Oracle/Sun Enforces Pay-For-Security-Updates Plan

[Mike]

Oracle/Sun Enforces Pay-For-Security-Updates Plan

Recently, the Oracle/Sun conglomerate has denied public download access to all service packs for Solaris unless you have a support contract.

Now, paying a premium for gold-class service is nothing new in the industry, but withholding critical security updates smacks of extortion. While this pay-for-play model may be de rigueur for enterprise database systems, it is certainly not the norm for OS manufactures.

What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licensing requirements since several of the Solaris cluster packs contain patches to GNU utilities and applications.