I have mixed feelings about this. I absolutely loathe the old, buggy, incompatible Solaris userland, and for me, Solaris can't die fast enough. OpenSolaris however seemed like a step in the right direction, keep the kernel and all the good things that come with it (DTrace, ZFS, etc) but drop in the GNU userland. I'd much rather Oracle kill Solaris proper and work on pushing OpenSolaris forward.
SunOS and later Solaris were my first real window into serious computing (along with IRIX). I'm kind of sad to see inevitable happening. It was a matter of time.
Nice article. The point he makes about Linux devs vastly outnumbering OpenSolaris devs is true for all of the free operating systems. Look at the CVS commits in OpenBSD. You can count on both hands the number of 'primary commiters' Thousands versus dozens makes a huge difference as does corporate involvement. I like all the free/open source operating systems, but I tend to go with GNU/Linux for this very reason.
... And right as I was putting some serious thought into using OpenSolaris with ZFS for my home file server. I wonder what the future of Solaris is now, too.
OpenSolaris is GPLv3, according to the article. Those who want to save it might take advantage of that. Try to pitch it to the FSF as the logical choice for the GNU kernel, instead of HURD.<p>Linux is GPLv2, not GPLv3, and there's no sign of that changing anytime soon, so it might be possible to interest the FSF on philosophical grounds to consider a replacement for Linux.
Now that Oracle has dumped it for good, I really hope that there is a resurgence of FOSS developers working on OpenSolaris to keep it alive and relevant...