Sun Makes Good on Free Solaris 10
Sun Microsystems made good on its promise to provide free Solaris 10 downloads. Sun's generosity extends to registered users who agree to use the software for non-commercial purposes. The announcement was made at Sun's quarterly Network Computing event, where the company frequently publicizes new products and services.
Sun used the occasion to flaunt benchmark results that placed Solaris OS performance ahead of Linux, which is expected to compete with OpenSolaris in the realm of open source software development. The benchmark results invoked claims that Solaris is the "industry's highest performance operating system."
Inevitably, like anything else that is high performance, Solaris requires maintenance. Customers who desire to have access to product support and big fixes must first enroll in a paid support program. Sun offers three tiers of service ranging from basic to standard to premium, which are priced accordingly at $120, $240 and $360 USD. Support contracts are annual subscriptions.
From Sun's perspective, there is a lot riding on the success of Solaris 10. Solaris' purpose is twofold: the OS is being used to shore up Sun's share of the Unix marketplace against competitors such as IBM and Hewlett Packard, and as a barrier against the encroachment of Windows and Linux into its domain. What's more, Sun has programmed Solaris to be versatile enough to support a wide variety of hardware platforms.
Although it is battling competitors on many fronts, Sun claims that Solaris is already earning its wings.
"There are already 750,000 installations of Solaris 10 through the Software Express for Solaris program. This strong interest underscores the fact that Solaris 10 is delivering tremendous value to customers, partners and developers," said John Loiacono, executive vice president, Software at Sun.
Last week, Sun publicly unveiled its plans to distribute an open source version of Solaris in a clear attempt to enlarge its community of developers and grow the industry's interest. Sun also contributed over 1600 patents to open source developers.