To update my earlier reporting , here's the current state, again as reported on the pca news page .

The new Sun access restrictions only apply to Solaris 10 (and anything Sun releases later). For Solaris 9 and earlier, Sun isn't making any changes for patch access; anonymous access via pca continues to work. (I was wondering about that, since I have been too busy to get around to getting a Sun Online Account, yet my patch access was still fine.)

Since all of my machines are Solaris 9 (or earlier) and I have no plans of upgrading to Solaris 10, this is ideal for me.

(While Solaris 10 has a fair amount of nice goodies, I have never done a Solaris OS upgrade, I have no idea how hassle-free it is, and the machines are old enough that we need to think about their future in general.)