Sun wants $1,358.95 for a one-year service contact for a three-year-old workstation

Sun Microsystems has figured out how to make money by giving away free hardware. It charges a small fortune for hardware and software support. In this case, I just received a quote for $1,358.95 for a one-year service agreement for my three-year-old Sun Ultra 20 workstation.

Let me provide some background.

At JavaOne 2005, Sun offered a promotional deal for developers who wanted a “free” a Sun workstation running Solaris with oodles of developer tools. All you had to do was buy a three-year support contract for $29.95/month. That came to just over $1,000, and since the list price of the machine alone was $895, it seemed a good deal. Intrigued, I signed up immediately, and in September 2005 received the following:

A63LWB1AE512DR-PRO $0.00
Sun Ultra 20 Workstation, 1 AMD Opteron 144 CPU, 512-MB Memory, A TI Entry 2D Graphics, 80-GB 7200 RPM SATA Disk, DVD-ROM, 10/100/1000 Ethernet, 6 USB 2.0 & 2 IEEE1394a Ports, 1 PCI Express x16, 2 PCI Express x1 & 4 PCI Slots, Dev Tools & Solaris 10 Pre-loaded

SUB-A63-3S $1078.20
3 Year Subscription Promotion for Sun Ultra 20 Workstation with Solaris 10, Sun Java Studio 10 and Sun Java Studio Creator

It was a sweet little machine. I wrote a review of it (which Sun liked so much that it quoted it on their Ultra 20 Web page). In mid-2007, though, the silver-colored desktop migrated into the garage, where it sat unused until 12 days ago, when my son resurrected it as an Ubuntu Linux desktop (see “From a pile of components to Ubuntu Linux in 25 minutes“).

By an odd coincidence, it happens to be almost three years since I received the machine, and Sun’s database shows the service contract is due for renewal. I wouldn’t have renewed it in any case, but I was appalled at the quoted price tag of $1,358.95 for a single year of support, split fairly evenly between the hardware, the Solaris operating system, and the Sun Studio 10 development suite. Here’s what the quote said:

1x SLVR-SYS-SVC Silver System Service Plan $490.20
Covered product:
A63LWB1AE 512DR-PRO Ultra 20 Workstation – Sun Ultra 20 Entry Config

2x STND-SW-SVC Standard Software Service Plan $868.55
Covered products:
SSSI9-100-T99M Sun Studio 10
SSSI9-T99M-3ST U Slmkt SP/x86/LX

Can you believe it?