Sun To Move Solaris Closer to Linux Model
“Solaris, version 8, will ship for free (for all versions running on under 8 processors). There will be a $75 fee for the bundle of applications that come with Solaris, which will include the open source products Apache and Sendmail as well as a restricted version of Oracle 8i. The official price for Solaris itself will be zero. Support will still be charged for, desktop support costing $199 per annum and low-end server support costing $449 per annum. … However Sun is not going to adopt the Linux license (the GPL).”
Call me a conspiracy theorist but Sun will only make money off of support. The less support needed the poorer Sun gets, doesn’t this give them incentative to make things difficult and problematic. It seems that haveing freely, as in GPL, distributable and modifable source code defeats this problem. Now the linux patern is emerging