After its recent acquisition of Sun, enterprise software vendor Oracle began making some significant changes to Solaris licensing policies. Solaris 10, the latest stable version of Sun's UNIX operating system, was previously available for free without official support. Oracle changed the license last month, however, limiting it to a 90-day trial. The new license is relatively clear, but left a number of questions unanswered.

An Ars reader put some of those questions to his Sun account manager and got clarification about exactly what the new license terms will mean for Solaris users. According to the response that he received, Oracle intends to stop selling standalone Solaris subscriptions. Software support will only be available with hardware contracts. As our reader Eric explains in his blog, "There is no possible way to legally run Solaris on non-Sun servers. Period. End of story."

He also got some clarification about the terms of the 90-day trial and the situations in which it is applicable. He was told that the software will remain free for personal noncommercial uses, but that the free download license is limited to a 90-day trial for commercial production use.

"The license and accompanying entitlement from the web, without a contract and without hardware, only entitle the downloader to no-commercial, nonproduction, or personal use in perpetuity. Production use and evaluation for production are good for 90 days," he was told.

As we explained in our previous coverage, this license covers the latest stable, official Solaris release and doesn't have any impact on OpenSolaris, the open source distribution of the operating system. Oracle has indicated, however, that OpenSolaris might not be getting all of the new Solaris features that are developed in the future. The overdue OpenSolaris 2010.03 release hasn't materialized yet; the delay is likely attributable to the understandable disruption caused by the acquisition.