Solaris 10 No Longer Free

Posted At : April 2, 2010 1:13 PM | Posted By : Gary Gilbert
Related Categories: Open Source,Oracle,Sun Microsystems

On Tuesday I read an article in the German IT news portal indicating that ~~Sun~~ Oracle has changed the licensing agreement for Solaris 10. It will no longer be free after a 90 day evaluation period, if you wish to continue using the OS you must sign a service contract. Unfortunately I don't know how much the service contract is but the days of free Solaris are over.

Open Solaris will remain free

There is some good news and that is Open Solaris will remain free without requiring a service contract, and Oracle has said that the OS will continue to be developed.

MySQL Future?

Although MySQL will continue to be open source and developed by Oracle when I read the news about Solaris my thoughts immediately turned to MySQL and it's future. After all Oracle makes a pricey Database System and has built it's fortunes with their Closed Source Licensing Model. They are now at the helm of a company that had embraced open source. There are bound to be changes with MySQL and while I won't go so far as to say that Oracle will sabotage the development of open source MySQL I do fear the widening of the gap between the open source and the enterprise versions of MySQL.