Oracle removed public downloads of pretty much everything except the initial releases of some products. Patches for Solaris, Sun Studio, etc., all require paid support ("entitlement" in Oracle speak). So if you had a Solaris installation and hit some bugs, your only choice is to re-install using the latest release, provided it is available. For Sun Studio the situation is even more insane: traditionally the initial releases of their C/C++ compiler were always so buggy that it required immediate patching to make them usable. And since Sun historically does not release updates for their compilers (unlike Solaris), this makes Sun Studio pretty much useless unless you have paid for support.

The firmware story is hilarious. You should go read some comments on Sun's website. People bought Sun hardware and when they went to download drivers to make that hardware work with their OS, they were told they needed to pay for "software support" to get them. What they got with hardware was apparently "hardware support" and it doesn't cover drivers/firmware. One word: insane.