Re: Sun T5220 firmware update

On Sun, 21 Oct 2018 10:23:41 -0700
John Nemeth <[email protected]> wrote:

>      Please don't ask for pirated stuff here.
>      Sun no longer exists.  Oracle has no interest in
> students/hackers. They are primarily aimed at the enterprise market
> and have done extremely well there (as a software company, they are
> second only to Microsoft in size).  I understand that there is some
> argument that if students/hackers like something they will bring it
> to the enterprise.  On the other hand, for that problems that Oracle
> Database is designed to solve, there is very little competition.

OK that is your view and I respect that, however:

I'm not trying to pirate anything. I paid for the hardware +
firmware some time ago, so paying silly money for Oracle support
contract just to update that single firmware makes no sense whatsoever.
I'm not using it for commercial purposes and can't justify the cost.
Most hardware manufacturers provide firmware updates for free! You can
make all sorts of moral judgements, but the biggest pirates are large
businesses like Google, Facebook etc, who take open source software for
free for their own gains and when they made billions of dollars in
profits, they use shady accounting practices to avoid paying taxes and
giving something back to the people. 

Over the last few years Oracle laid off a large number of SPARC and
Solaris developers. Solaris is pretty good - ZFS, Dtrace, Zones, LDoms,
etc, but it is rather awkward if you don't have deep pockets:

- Want to upgrade to Solaris 11.3, need to update sever firmware,
which  will cost you $$$.

- Want to upgrade to Solaris 11.4, well sun4v is not supported, must
buy new expensive hardware. OK so if sun4v is now deprecated, why
charge for some silly firmware update?

Something stinks about this. Unsurprisingly young people use Linux
and x86 and when those same people graduate and work at enterprise
businesses that used to buy Oracle hardware, they replace it with
Linux and x86.