Linux.com

At first the new licensing scheme from Sun sounded radical, and customer friendly. Mr. Schwartz claimed it would save customers money. But on reflection, and further research, it sounds alot like Microsoft's Licensing 6.0 scam. For the Java Enterprise System $100 per employee per year. Not bad, except right off the bat it turns out this only covers apps (like directory, application/web and mail services), not O/S (Solaris) and hardware maintenance. ALso turns out its limited to stuff running on Sun hardware. Then it turns out that my company, at a puny 10,000 employees will not be entitled to bundled maintenance on the software, just some incident vouchers (remmember the old MSDN Universal subscription?). So just for our apps we'd have to pay $100,000. But right now we're probably paying less than $10,000 (we use the Sun directory server, but are transitioning from the Enterprise server to Apache and BEA). And the desktop? That's not included in the $100/employee/year. It's another $50/employee/year ($100 if we don't go for Enterprise licensing). So I wind up paying $150,000 per year to get in "on the ground floor" of what Sun claims will be a sea change in IT. Thinking about it now, what I think Sun has done is make the move to Open Source even more inevitable. With all of the major IT vendors now promoting extortionate licensing programs IT execs won't have any choice but to turn to the OSS proponents in their companies and give us another hearing. Carpe diem folks -- seize the day. And thank you, Sun, for pushing the whole proprietary software world over the cliff -- finally.

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