Is Solaris Gaining Power?
 

A few months ago most documentation I have read on Linux related stuff never talked about Solaris but now when they go through major distributions, unix like stuff, OSs in general, Solaris comes up. I know it's no just that the right papers hit me at the right time. It used to be Red Hat that I saw everywhere! Is this just a recent marketing-spaz attack by Oracle? Or is solaris starting to get somewhere?

If you look here http://www.levenez.com/unix/unix_a4.pdf you'll see that SunOS/Solaris is a LOT older than Linux (owned by SUN until Oracle bought them).
Oracle only really finished taking over SUN about a year ago and it takes a while to fully absorb something like that.
The new Solaris 11 is the last version with minimal input from Oracle.
They're certainly doing some marketing, but I think that's because Solaris 11 recently came out & they've announced some new SPARC Processors + capabilities.

Well, is OpenSolaris still available? I want to try it now but it seems as if Oracle (If I'm ever rich and famous I'll buy oracle and split Sun back into it's own company) shut it down... Is in is there a team managing a replacement (like the original goal of libreoffice?) or a re hosted download? I know plain solaris is free (beer) but I hate getting stressed over licensing issues...
Also, how old is minix compared to Solaris/SunOS? I read somewhere that Linux was made in a Mini environment until Linux was strong enough to hold a C/C++ compiler.
Edit: Sorry, apparently MINIX is ancient, read the article again and forgot that MINIX stands for Mini-Unix

Oracle Solaris is in very difficult situation right now, because after Oracle acquired Sun, all the original ZFS creators left, all DTrace team left, also people responsible for networking (Crossbow) and Zones left Oracle after acquisition.

You may wonder where all them left, well, to companies that now develop Illumos, the fork of OpenSolaris.

So generally, if You want to get answer for question 'What is the future of Oracle Solaris?' then the answer is 'Illumos'.

Watch this to get all information on current state of Solaris/OpenSolaris/Illumos/OpenIndiana ecosystem: http://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc

Oracle bought Sun, and Oracle is an Enterprise Database vendor. The database is the heart of a company, the most important system. Oracle have clear majority in database market. Sun had 35.000 Solaris customers. Oracle has 350.000 Enterprise customers. Oracle is heavily promoting Solaris to these customers and are investing heavily in Solaris and SPARC. Thus, Solaris has a brighter future than ever. Already, Oracle has 65.000 Solaris customers today. Solaris is gaining customers in the Enterprise market.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/dis...C_T5_Chip.html