[pca] No more free patches

[Dennis Clarke]

> Jeff Wieland wrote:
>> There was a time, maybe circa 2003-4, when one could download any patch
>> without a contract.  Of course back then you had to pay real money for
>> Solaris -- you could not download it for free.
>
> Hm. Solaris 8 was free for machines with up to 8 processors. It was
> released at the beginning of year 2000, IIRC. I think the policy changed
> with Solaris 9, after the dot.com crash, and it was free for machines with
> smaller number of CPUs. One or two, probably, but my memory is hazy.
>
> I don't recall all patches being free at any point in time, but I stopped
> working with Solaris in 2003 and came back very recently.

Hold on a sec there my good man. I was working with Solaris 2.5 and 2.5.1
a *lot* back in 1995 or so. I recall that we needed to have a platinum
support contract for everything from our SPARCcenter 2000E to the new
screaming E4500 series boxes. We even had a Compaq Proliant 5000 server
with SMART Array controllers running Solaris 2.5.1 x86 and it ran very
very neatly with multiple 200MHz procs. However, we did need a contract to
get any patch from the Sun patch site. It was just ftp back then I think.
Not entirely sure really. In any case, this is all just history, we need a
contract for sure these days and I'm okay with that if the quality remains
high.

-- 
Dennis Clarke
dclarke at opensolaris.ca  <- Email related to the open source Solaris
dclarke at blastwave.org   <- Email related to open source for Solaris