Why can't we buy Solaris 8 at CompUSA?

I was just on Suns website and found that you can actually download Solaris 8 and not have to pay the licensing fee. You can also purchase the OS on CD's for $75.00.

It seems also that Gnome 1.4 is supported too on Solaris 8 which would make the OS as easy to use as any Linux Distribution.

Why then doesn't Sun adopt a similar marketing stratagy as say SUSE or Redhat? Packaging there OS for the Desktop.

Couldn't they still maintain market share on the Server side while gaining some on the Desktop.

Why doesn't SGI do the same as well with IRIX?

Does anyone have an opinion on this?

:smiley:

While Sun is basically giving away Solaris 8, they want to keep a tight grasp on how many Solaris installations are out there. The only real requirement to use the free Solaris is that you report back to Sun how many installations you have.