This is the closed source version of Solaris, you can't redistribute it period.

To rephrase, take one product and sell it to each customer for as much as they can afford, using the number of cores and amount of RAM in their server(s) to judge.

It's bizarre how the article carelessly switches from talking about Solaris (well, OpenSolaris FUD) to four or five paragraphs about "Project Wonderland", implying that Wonderland has something to do with OpenSolaris. I had to do a web search to remind myself what in the world this project was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Wonderland [wikipedia.org]

If you read more closely, you'll see OpenSolaris is poisoned by dependencies on key closed components (including libc) that Sun never released, only providing binary builds for. That fork's a non-trivial task.

Here's five:

• Crossbow
• Kernel Mode CIFS Server
• Zones
• Logical Domains
• COMSTAR: iSCSI & Fibre Channel

...plus five more reasons why ZFS counts as more than one 'feature'. Just cause it's easy to do with ZFS, doesn't each of these aren't killer features on their own.

• Snapshots & Time Slider
• Boot Environments
• Checksums for Data Integrity ('zpool scrub' lets me sleep at night)
• Deduplication
• Hybrid Storage Pools (Hard Disks and Flash are more useful together)

ZFS+DTrace are great, but certainly not the only features Solaris10/OpenSolaris/SolarisNext have going for it.

Yes. Correct on almost all accounts. It might even be worthwhile, but SUN managed to create an artificial community only. According to my 2 Sen, this also broke its neck: In and out. Free Java, no, don't, free Solaris, yes, no, new license. And the 'community' could decide what they wanted, as SUN employees they had to follow Ponytail's zig-zag course.
No, it is not 'fairly similar' to the other Unix-like systems, though. Actually, it is the furthest away from those systems.

Nothing is being "switched" all the OpenSolaris stuff is still there, Oracle just won't be adding new features it develops to it. All the code that was there is still open even without the magical GPL and can be developed further. From TFA :

"The good news is that those of us who have worked so hard to bring this project to life still wholeheartedly believe in it. A core group of the Wonderland team intends to keep the project going. We will be pursuing both for-profit and not-for-profit options that will allow us to become a self-sustaining organization. "

While the existing codebase is licensed irrevocably under the Open Solaris license, Oracle doesn't need to release any changes under that license and doesn't need to accept any community additions.

Any changes/upgrades to the various subsystems of Solaris such as ZFS need not be released under the open license.

And if you read http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/no_source [opensolaris.org] , which is the ACTUAL list of non-source-available components, you'll only see "libc_i18n" listed. Not libc.

There's no such thing as a troop of Eagle Scouts.

That's like a platoon of sergeants.

Hey, Einstein, anybody in computers is a janitor; just the pay levels change. Machines are getting both faster and smarter, needing fewer people to do a given amount of work. Add to this the tendency of most companies to treat the majority of their IT staff like shit, AND the hateful, unmentioned but expected 24-7 support so the PHB can get his email and you'll realize that ANY time in IT is time wasted. Even one year in IT is a career backwater. I'm doing everything I can to get out, even in this economy.

"This led to a simple solution: over-tighten them."
I would suggest locktite :) no really it should work a treat but kind of scary to use on a 30k machine.

Oracle has made clear that Solaris has an important place in their integrated vertical offerings (why should they use anything else? the capabilities of Solaris+ZFS+dtrace are way above anything else in offer in the industry, Sun put several storage servers that show the potential of the integrated offering, Oracle I am sure is not oblivious to that, the day they had their talk about cloud computing in London they made a point of showing Sun hardware and of giving a slot to a Sun guy).

FTFY.

I worked support at a company that Oracle acquired and we went from having the best support money could buy to having the most expensive answering service money could buy. Oracle works very hard to make sure that their support process is consistent, repeatable and efficient at handling the volume of issues submitted. You'll notice I didn't say anything about being good at handling issues, that is not a concern for them. Most of the folks who were any good at all found jobs elsewhere and were replaced by offshore staf with little to no knowledge of the product whose primary purpose was to shuffle requests around while they drowned the few remaining decent support staff with inane questions. This is my understanding at least based on talking with folks who are still there, I was one of the first rats who fled that sinking ship.

No matter how bad Sun's support may have been in recent years* you can rest assured that it will be worse under Oracle's ownership.

All the being said, AC is right, Oracle sells to management not to the geeks. There's still a general perception amongst the management types that "you can't be fired for buying Oracle".

*I've never used Sun's support, no idea if it's been decent or not.

When I transitioned from Solaris and AIX to supporting RH and SuSE several years ago, I experienced somewhat of a shock: servers hanging on shutdown, lousy NFS performance, Samba slowing down to a crawl under moderately heavy load and a crapload of other issues I never thought a unixoid OS can suffer from. All these problems coupled with consumer-grade hardware and what you get is one big, never-ending downtime. Something is always down or barely limping along.[emphasis added]

I dunno how many years this was ago but in the time I have been using Linux (since 1999), scalability and performance on the server-side have improved greatly, in large part due to IBM's interest in trying to bring Linux up to the level of AIX in these areas..... Comparing Linux to Solaris in 1999 would have been like comparing Windows ME to Linux at the same time. However things have improved a great deal. In particular the schedular wars have left us with a far better OS than we ha before.

I have generally found Linux to be the most admin-friendly OS out there. This is reason to use it where it works well. More recently Linux has gotten a lot of effort in resolving those very problems you mention.

Posting anonymously because I'm an employee, but in the short-term, this is simply a way of extracting more money from existing customers who will be forced to pay the "Oracle tax". Oracle raised prices in 2008 [infoworld.com] and 2009 [readwriteweb.com], but this year we were told "you have to increase revenues, but can't just keep raising the product prices". The solution? Sell more of existing product or sell new products. The trouble is, any new products (either developed or acquired) need some time to get traction. What better way to boost revenue than to find critical Oracle-owned components that we aren't charging for and beginning to charge? Sure, customers have a choice technically, but in reality any company heavily invested in Solaris will find it too costly to switch in the short term.