Generally, I’m a fan of Sun Microsystems. For the most part, I like their hardware and their software - and their best products show real innovation and willingness to take risks. I’m also a fan of Amazon’s EC2 product, so the announcement that Sun would be officially bundling OpenSolaris for EC2 was great news. Unfortunately, it seems that after all the hullabaloo, Sun doesn’t really want to make it that easy for you to actually use OpenSolaris on EC2, by managing access to it like a control freak would.
I could throw in some snarkiness here about the titanic struggles that must be going on inside Sun between those that do and don’t “get it” on the OpenSolaris team, or pontificate that Sun just doesn’t get Open Source, period. Instead, I’ll leave you with a single thought: If one of EC2’s principal attractions is reducing friction in creating, prototyping, deploying and scaling, does Sun really expect to be successful by throwing up barriers to entry?
(Until I hear back from Sun - “our technical team will review your requirements and get back to you shortly” - guess I’ll just fire up a Fedora AMI. Oh well.)
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