It might not be an instant silver bullet (it would still take time, and one owner with the right skills, or at least the will to acquire them or hire someone who does), but it would at least put the power to do something squarely into the hands of users, and completely future-proof the Solaris forever.chapolin wrote:I really believe in open source things, but I think that there is not enough users to put the Solaris Os in the open source world.
I believe the small number of owners can be an issue for the pay-for-fixes model rather.
How many months of a software engineer's salary can several dozen (maybe a few hundred) potential software update purchasers realistically support ?
It could work as one-off push for bugfixes that add to the instrument's value though (because of that I'd probably be ready to pay 100-300ish), but it doesn't sound very sustainable in the long run, because people aren't going to pay hundreds every few months are they ? Well, maybe they would, I don't know ...
Also, do you make this donation-based, with the update eventually available to everyone ?
Or are new owners automatically entitled to the fixed OS but others stuck with whatever came with what they bought ? It's morally tricky to support, especially if we're talking bug fixes not features.