People know that I've been extremely skeptical of Sun's "we'll make it up in volume" open source strategery, and here's an article from PC World that asks whether Solaris is doomed. This bit was interesting:

The Linux Foundation's Zemlin, though, dismisses Sun's open-source Solaris as "too little, too late." His foundation has also charged that there is no real open source community around OpenSolaris, arguing that Sun still controls development. To back up its point, the foundation points to blogs detailing disputes over control of OpenSolaris and the Sun-driven OpenDS directory projects, from February 2008 and November 2007. Sun declined to comment on the specifics of these issues and noted they both happened several months ago. Zemlin claims Open Solaris is no more than an attempt to expand the Solaris user base to drive customers to commercial Sun technology.

That brought to mind something I heard on "The Stack Trace" this afternoon while I exercised: for an open source strategy to really work, you need to have a big enough community to be relevant. For Solaris, the difficulty is Linux - it tends to "suck the oxygen out of the room" on them.

Sun may not have any good options for Solaris, to be honest. Commodity x86 hardware running Linux scales nicely for server environments, and the outfits building out huge server farms (Amazon, Google) aren't about to switch from Linux. It probably doesn't help that the've gone on an insane spending spree (MySQL) though.