(Open)Solaris died a few years ago. It has got some great features like Zones and ZFS, and it's still very stable. However, they lost the hearts and minds of almost everyone. I used OpenSolaris for a few months as my desktop. They don't have the package support of Linux, or the large community. Gotta remember to get GNU Make before Sun's Make in PATH, Gnu sed before Sun's, or was the other way around, Perl CPAN modules not compiling... What a waste of time.<p>As Scott McNealy said: you've gotta get all your wood behind one arrow. That arrow is now Linux.
I've been following this for a while. OpenSolaris, VirtualBox and MySQL are all things I was worried about surviving in the wake of Oracle's takeover. I use all three quite a bit.
I installed FreeBSD a couple weeks back just so I could play around with ports and ZFS. Getting ZFS to work with the bootloader is kind of a pain (should be fixed in FreeBSD-9, I'm hoping) but otherwise I was blown away by just how intuitive ZFS is to use and how ridiculously powerful. ZFS was introduced in 2005(!) and I'm <i>still</i> amazed by how far ahead of the pack it is. It's really a damn shame that we can't get ZFS into the Linux kernel because of licensing.
Here's a view from a prominent member of the (rather small) OpenSolaris community: <a href="http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134" rel="nofollow">http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=1134</a><p>He's not exactly impressed.
Maybe its for the best. I'm not a big fan of autotools, but proliferation of semi-compatible UNIXes was the reason behind this mess. I'd be absolutely happy with just Linux/BSD/Macs to worry about.
I'd love to have a lively discussion here about OpenSolaris, could not upvote this enough (actually I don't think my upvote counts at all, is that because I don't have karma yet?)
That's a threat?!<p>Larry Ellison: "Uh, sure, we'll get right back to you on that."<p>[Larry alt-tabs back to his word processor with a draft of his Solaris Developer Trial licensing plan: foree for 30 days followed by a $9000-per-seat licensing fee]