that doesn't really make sense. organizations with enough cash to use solaris for production environment probably have enough cash to pay for licenses for dev/

that doesn't really make sense. organizations with enough cash to use solaris for production environment probably have enough cash to pay for licenses for dev/staging environments too. this move is likely a (desperate?) try to keep solaris relevant among open source developers. tbh, if I were developing something and somebody asked me to support a proprietary operating system I can't run in a VM... the least I'd ask for is for them to provide me a licensed environment (like at least a virtual machine or something, with the license paid by the requestor) for me to run tests and stuff.