Solaris 11 is free for personal use?

The short answer is yes, with limits, Solaris 11 can be used without fee for personal, non-commercial, non-production use. This use is limited to 'developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating' applications using Solaris, but the terms are loose enough that pretty much any personal, non-commercial, non-production use is allowed.

If you are really concerned about license terms, it's probably better to look at definitive sources (Oracle itself) rather than blogs like YAPP. Among other things, YAPPs comments about no licensing for non-Oracle hardware are completely incorrect. Based on that, I wouldn't trust any of the rest of what you read on that blog post either.

See the Solaris FAQ here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/s...11/documentation/o11-135-sol11-faq-524533.pdf

The relevant answer is found on the bottom of the sixth page:
Oracle Solaris 11 can be downloaded from the Oracle Technical Network under the terms of the Oracle Technology Network Developer Licensing Terms for Oracle Solaris which permits for a perpetual license for the purposes of developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating applications on Oracle
Solaris 11. ...
Click to expand...

The detailed license they refer to can be found here: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/licenses/solaris-studio-license-169628.html
 
PigLover said:
This use is limited to 'developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating' applications using Solaris, but the terms are loose enough that pretty much any personal, non-commercial, non-production use is allowed.
Click to expand...

Maybee its tolerated but not allowed.
You can test, develop and demonstrate but you are NOT allowed to just use it at home after testing.

Unclear how long can last testing?
A week, a month - not a year?
 
_Gea said:
Maybee its tolerated but not allowed.
You can test, develop and demonstrate but you are NOT allowed to just use it at home after testing.

Unclear how long can last testing?
A week, a month - not a year?
Click to expand...
How long? As long as you want, I believe.

Oracle sales people has said they dont care about home users, Solaris 11 is free for personal use. Yes, they have said this, but informally. Not on paper. Oracle has never (to my knowledge) and will not chase home users. Oracle is interested in the Enterprise users that pay big bucks. Home usage is not on Oracles radar.

So I am going to develop some, and test some. And web surf, and develop some more. And test some stuff, etc. Just normal Unix usage. To that, S11 is fine and free.
 
_Gea said:
Maybee its tolerated but not allowed.
You can test, develop and demonstrate but you are NOT allowed to just use it at home after testing.

Unclear how long can last testing?
A week, a month - not a year?
Click to expand...

Their license terms are actually clear. Your test/demonstration interval is "perpetual". In plain English, that is forever.

They clearly describe commercial use. They clearly describe production use (which for you, _Gea, clearly rules out using it for your school systems - they may be non-commercial, but they still satisfy Oracle's definition of "production"). Personal use at home does not fit either of these definitions.

Their definition of "developing, testing, prototyping and demonstrating" is much looser. As long as you are demonstrating it in some way, at least occasionally, you are clearly meeting the terms of the license. As defined in their license, if you occasionally edit one line of one script and you are "developing". Run that script to see if it works and you are "testing".

Based on this, I'd conclude that personal, non-commercial, non-production use remains permitted under the terms of their license - especially for the uses that are typical of [H] readers.. I am obviously not a lawyer - if you need certainty you should get appropriate legal advice.
 
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The next question is "do you want to run it for free?"

What I really think you're paying for from a practical, even if not legal, standpoint is not the right to run the OS, but rather the associated support. Like brutalizer, I don't think Oracle feels the need to milk every penny from every home user interested in running it... they know that my ability to run it freely may lead to me championing it at work as an IT professional, and they know that Solaris 11 is not intended to compete with Windows 7 and Mac OS X.

As a home user I can live with system hangs that I can't patch for (that might be related to my custom hardware or Windows domain configuration) and will probably do a total reinstall if they release a new build ISO. As an enterprise, I'd need security patches and support and would probably buy hardware from an VAR.
 
Yes I think, the main point is
SHOULD one use Solaris without paying to Oracle beside test and demonstrating something?

For me its clear. NO
Beside support, there is no reason.

Only advantage of Solaris 11 is native ZFS encryption. On OI, you can use LOFI encryption on ZFS, a little bit slower but
much more practical because you can backup your encrypted pool data unlike to Solaris 11. And you are on common Pool v28 with OI.
 
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I prefer Solaris 11 because I use SunRay thin clients. That software is more closely tied to Solaris 11, than OpenIndiana. I can be a royal pain to make it work for OI, but if it does, I can switch to OI.

My ZFS pool will stay on a low number, so I can switch between OI and Solaris 11. I will not upgrade the ZFS pool.
 
_Gea said:
Yes I think, the main point is
SHOULD one use Solaris without paying to Oracle beside test and demonstrating something?

For me its clear. NO
Beside support, there is no reason.
Click to expand...
Will I pay 800EUR for an OS that's just serving ZFS via SMB? NO. I'm not making money with it.
 
From Oracle:
https://blogs.oracle.com/orasysat/entry/summary_of_the_solaris_11

"Q: Is Oracle Solaris free or do we need to purchase?
A: Solaris is free, the entitlement to run it comes either with a Sun system (new or historical) or for 3rd party systems the entitlement comes with a support contract. Note that for production use you will be expected to get a support contract. If you don't want to use the Solaris system (Sun or 3rd party) for production use (i.e. development) you can get an OTN license on the Oracle Technical Network website."

How do we interpret it? It is free for non production use?
 
It pretty much all boils down to what "production" means.

For me it means "if i was being paid to maintain this network, would I still have a job?" and for my home network usage, and how often I break things, the answer would be "oh hell no".

I can't imagine Oracle or Microsoft or any other large company that distributes software for use in a lab environment (either free or paid subscription ala technet) expects that a "lab" is a limited time thing that's put together for one purpose, then shut down when that project goes into production. Most "labs" run concurently with their production environments that's why technet keys don't have expirations, and you can get free unlimited use solaris development licenses.

Would any of our home network lab setups qualify as "production" by any sort of corporate standard? As long as you still sometimes play "what does this setting do" with something on your network, it's still a lab, even if you use it for semi-normal stuff most of the time.

Oracle wants us to get free licenses and dick around with it at home, they want us learning solaris instead of linux or freebsd, because it costs them practically nothing to give them away and if even 0.1% of the people downloading and using them at home eventually get into a position of power and can say "I used solaris before lets go with them" and land them thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands in contracts then it's worth every last penny they spent setting it up. They don't get anything from the people that say "well solaris is supposedly pretty good but I've got more linux experience so lets go with that".

Using their super ZFS system to stream movies to your living room media player may not be super high on their list of recommended usage, but they're not going to break down your door and demand you pay up or stop if you do, but imo the definition of "production" is intentionally vague in these TOUs, because they don't want to straight say "do whatever as long as you're not making money" but at the same time they want it out there in peoples hands getting used.
 
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