Chris asks where OpenSolaris is headed. My reaction: nobody cares anymore. FreeBSD established itself as the alternative to Linux, and that leaves Solaris with no niche. So, whatever. It is much more important what is going to happen to OpenOffice and MySQL. Also, Sun carried a pretty large assortment of lesser projects, such as Lustre.
UPDATE: A couple of comments were made, which I wish to save. First, danfe wrote:
Except that Solaris-born projects (ZFS, DTrace) greatly contributed to what actually makes FreeBSD so prominent today. I believe there're lots of folks that care neither for OOo nor MySQL, but for Solaris Zones and ZFS. [Open]Solaris was bringing all those things that actually innovated Unix, like Sun was known for doing during previous years (NFS, PAM, NSS first come to mind).
Let us ignore the obvious spin and bias and assume that the lead statement is true and FreeBSD took some technologies from Solaris. What difference does it make going forward? It's not like Solaris can develop any faster in all other areas outside of ZFS. As for the historic refresher in the second half, it is even less relevant. Who cares about the ancient history and past accomplishments of Solaris if it is dead now?
diegocg poses a question:
I think it's the contrary... OpenSolaris has established itself as the alternative to FreeBSD. FBSD is surviving today thanks to Solaris code such as ZFS, which means that FBSD is losing its personality - why use FBSD with ZFS, when you can use the _real_ thing, which is a much better OS anyway?
I have a good answer: because Solaris does not run on the hardware you care about, that's why. Also, see another post by CKS.
