IT's time to remove the Solaris 8 packages

Laurent Blume laurent at opencsw.org
Wed Dec 3 23:09:25 CET 2014


People,

There's another guy on IRC coming to ask for S8 binaries. I think it is 
more than time to remove them from the archive.

I have nothing against him, he asked nicely, But nevertheless, they must go.

At this point, they are more a liability than anything else. All the 
famous vulnerabilities are there, HEARTBLEED, SHELLSHOCK, POODLE, and 
those who've not done the headlines.

The people who come asking for them are following a pattern: they're 
obviously not experimented, and they clearly are not able to assess the 
risks, and *never* in a position to take decision.

Then, their employers follow a similar pattern: they're cheapskates, who 
want to get as much money as possible from obsolete systems with no 
investment in time nor money. They willingly put their customers are 
risk because of their greed.

And lastly, there's an existing alternative, there's SunFreeware, which, 
from a quick look, has much more recent packages.

So frankly, I think we're doing a disservice to everybody by keeping 
those old files online. They should be removed. If a company is 
motivated to revive it and provides resources for it, welcome to it. But 
those files as they stand are just used as an excuse to avoid doing that.

Thanks,

Laurent


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