[External] IT's time to remove the Solaris 8 packages

[Wyche, George PW]

If you want to play the #s, then fine. However, your characterization is faulty.

Our Sun workstations are all in house. Not a single one has access to anything outside. All are Solaris 8. Now and then somebody asks for a feature which does exist for Solaris 8, so we used to easily get it from openCSW. This is a small outfit... this department. It's a Windows place that'd just as soon get rid all *nix anything, but they inherited us and moved us around on the books, so nobody outside has been exposed (for any length of time) to our Solaris workstations and see the light of another world of computing.

We did not download the entire offering of openCSW Solaris 8. I did pay $ for DVDs back in the time of Blastwave, but evidently "it was lost in the mail". We really screwed up by not doing what was absolutely necessary to capture the entire offering of Solaris 10 BEFORE OpenCSW had advanced past the version where you could install Solaris with 5 CDs, because after that... too bad if you don't have a DVD reader, no later version of Solaris 10 for you. Without the later version of Solaris 10... Grr! We have Solaris 8 because we cannot get Solaris 10 with the same set of features as Solaris 8.

Just sayin',
George Wyche

-----Original Message-----
From: users [mailto:users-bounces+george.wyche=pw.utc.com at lists.opencsw.org] On Behalf Of Laurent Blume
Sent: Wednesday, December 03, 2014 4:09 PM
To: Questions and discussions; List for OpenCSW maintainers
Subject: [External] IT's time to remove the Solaris 8 packages

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