Free servers?

I wrote this post in 2006, more than 18 years ago. It may be very out of date, partially or totally incorrect. I may even no longer agree with this, or might approach things differently if I wrote this post today. I rarely edit posts after writing them, but if I have there'll be a note at the bottom about what I changed and why. If something in this post is actively harmful or dangerous please get in touch and I'll fix it.

So Sun’s giving away T2000 servers for free.

Well sort of, anyway: you get to try ’em for 60 days, and according to Jonathan Schwartz if you post benchmarks of the thing’s performance, the sales department “might” let you keep the thing.

Sounds too good to be true, eh? Well, I’m certainly not going to pass up the chance to fiddle with an quad-core, $8,000 server for a few months, so I filled out the form. If I actually get one, I’ll run some benchmarks of the Django stack and see how it performs.

It’s entirely unclear from Schwartz’s post exactly how I’m supposed to apply to keep the thing for free, and there’s not really any details of the promotion on Sun’s site. If they’re serious about letting people get these things for free, they’re really doing a bad job. The whole process looks and smells like a scam; like one of those slimy try-before-you-buy-but-not-really car salesman tactics.

Still… I get to poke at an $8,000 server for a few weeks, so how can I say no?

Stay tuned and we’ll see how this this goes.