When you choose an OS for your laptop, many things affect your decision: application support, availability of drivers, ease of use, and so on.

But if you were developing a storage appliance, what would you want from the operating system that runs inside it?

How the mighty have fallen. Beaten off the desktop by Windows, off the server by Linux, Solaris retreats into the appliance to make its glorious last stand.

OpenSolaris gives you [a littany of things]; and of course the OpenSolaris community, a large, vibrant, professional, high signal-to-noise environment.

If memory serves me correctly, it is the community where Schilly finds his refuge. If so, I don't know if I would use the same adjectives to describe it. But I am quite ignorant about characteristics of various communities, so who knows. Maybe it's large.

Larry McVoy was prescient when he wrote in 1993: "On the other hand, if the politics kill such an idea [open-sourced Solaris], most software developers will simply give up on Sun and SPARC and focus instead on Linux and Intel. Sun has most to lose here." [link]. Now we're observing the last ditch attempts to do something about the situation into which Sun has placed itself.

And to think that Larry wrote this when Linux did not even have NFS.

{Update: Now Jeff pushed DaveM's buttons with Solaris propaganda [link]. David sounds a bit too agitated, but I can sympathize. If I had to debunk the same tired anti-Linux FUD as much as a guy with DaveM's visibility has, I might've gone postal by now.}