Oracle doesn't permit downloading even critical patches without contract? WTF!

WTF is going on with Oracle? I have logged into SunSolve (my login still 
works) and found that I cannot even download the critical patch update 
packages without a service contract (which of course I don't have).

How is that meant to engender long-term grass-roots support for the Sun 
hardware base if end-users such as ourselves with legacy hardware can't 
get even the most important of patches....

In my case, I want to upgrade my SB1000 running Solaris 9 which is 
unfortunately now running an old (about 2 to 3 years or so) set of patches 
and since the b/s started with Sun closing down more and more of SunSolve 
to 'joe public' users, I can't get any way to upgrade the installed OS.

BTW I tried booting the machine off both of the Solaris 10 DVD's I burnt 
prior to my annual leave and the system will not boot off either. It just 
sits there in a loop after starting to look for something to load until I 
break it out with stop-A back to the OBP prompt.

My confidence in Sun's long-term future has dropped a lot in the last year 
or so and now it's taken a big hit. If I didn't have so much 3rd-party 
open source stuff compiled and installed I would look to migrate the 
machine to a different OS (NetBSD or Gentoo Linux probably) and dump Sun's 
OS.

Not Happy Jan!

-- 
Craig Dewick - Adelaide Australia - Web: http://lios.apana.org.au/~cdewick"
Email: [email protected] - SunShack: http://www.sunshack.org
Galleries: http://www.sunshack.org/gallery2 - Pantbotof and the Fading Sun at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/navarzo3/sets/72157622209300431/