Comments on: Sun restricting access to SunSolve and the System Handbook

By: (e)Mail Insecurity

(e)Mail Insecurity — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 06:44:35 +0000

The demise of SunSolve as we know it

By: Michael C. Vergallen

Michael C. Vergallen — Tue, 05 Apr 2005 23:53:28 +0000

Hi,

I’ve had contact with someone from sun who’s actually told me that the documentation to older systems & EOL systems will remain the same. However the new systems will require a support contract in future … In a way one should not take the original posting with a bit of salt. Now what I suspect is that SUN’s documentation devision is not as profitable as it ones was and that is the reaseon they are charging again for access to the documentation.

NOTE : This is my opinion and has not been verified.

By: Matt Prazak

Matt Prazak — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 03:44:55 +0000

The end result will be a greater incentive for small customers to buy EOL hardware second-hand or to buy non-Sun x86 systems, and it is up to Sun to decide wether this market segment matters to them.
I agree that this is generally the opposite direction they should go, but I am not responsible for their profitability, either. We should note, however, that even Red Hat faces a similar dillema with RHEL, where money has to come from somewhere. With RHEL, free clones were made, so with SunSolve, perhaps the response would be to run OpenSolaris on non-Sun x86 hardware. It’s hard to say what the final impact of this whould be…but some indications show Red Hat slipping a bit, recently.

By: Devin L. Ganger

Devin L. Ganger — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 06:47:51 +0000

Whether or not the changes are smaller than we think, the fact is that Sun is going in the opposite direction than they need to go, especially now that they’re making Solaris 10 open source.

By: Matt Prazak

Matt Prazak — Thu, 17 Mar 2005 02:25:12 +0000

I wrote SunSolve asking about this, and they said that documentation for EOL hardware will still be avavailable for free under the “Archived SunSolve content.” The effect of the changes will be less than I initially thought, although it might affect people needing information on Sun’s newer hardware.

By: mg midget

mg midget — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 07:50:04 +0000

i hope, there will a lot of unofficial sources on the web then. maybe they realise
afterwards, that they will lose customers by restricting their offers.

Hse

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 13 Mar 2005 10:28:56 +0000

I’ve sent my comments about this to Sun. I hope many others do so too, and maybe they’ll realise that restricting access to systems documentation isn’t the best of ideas….

Funny though, they preach openness but close their own documentation sources…