I suspected that's what you meant, but I wasn't sure. Thanks for the clarification.

I'm sorry but you are still missing the point.

You insist derailing this discussion which is about mission critical decision maker preferences to a religious "BSD and Linux are better than everything else, for any use. Any contradiction is myth, propaganda or just doesn't exists".

That's not my way of viewing things. Depending on the needs, I do recommend to people different Operating Systems.

The OP question was not "Is Solaris preferred ...", but "Why is Solaris preferred ...". I gave the reasons I heard the most and, as a messenger, was shot a couple of times.

Okay, I'm a messenger with an opinion, but this opinion is in no way single sided, I acknowledge and I'm happy with the fact Linux and BSD have strengths, Windows (sigh) has strengths, and, don't be surprised, Solaris has strengths.

A lot of what you write about Solaris is either biased, obsolete or untrue.

I gave you some facts, you carefully ignore them.

Administration is hard on Solaris ? have a look at zpool/zfs commands vs other raid/volume management, svcs/svcadm, fssnap, flar, self-healing, dtrace, jumpstart, JET, smpatch, pkg-get, just to name a few ...
I intentionally put here something that is obviously coming from the Linux world (pkg-get from apt-get).
Yes, Solaris includes and supports a lot of Open Source software, Sun is in contributing to many FOSS projects, including one that boosted Linux credibility in the desktop (OpenOffice).

Patching is easier with Linux ? What are the equivalent of showrev, patchadd, patchrm or pkgchk ? How do you backout a patch with Linux ?

Trusted Solaris no more supported ? Most of it is actually integrated in the standard Solaris 10, which in fact enhance it with Zones.
ACL, RBAC and PRM are undoubtly there.

Many mission critical customers want their top applications to have a predictible priority, Solaris Resource Management is providing that since Solaris 2.6 (1998), what is the Linux equivalent (CKRM) status in 2005 ?

Still not happy with performance on Sun Intel architecture H/W ? the v40z rocks, it won 20 world records in different benchmarks: http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/v40z/benchmarks.html
and the new x4200 will undoubtly go farther:
http://www.sun.com/servers/entry/x4200/benchmarks.jsp

My best advice would be for you to learn what Solaris is today, and take advantage of it instead of being a Linux/BSD zealot. The Open Source movement is about sharing and learning from other's experience, not religious wars.

Man, your 1st response was a diatribe on the GNU/Linux's model, that you perceive as "amateur" and pretending it's perceived as such when the fact is that there are players that happen to be be the ones producing the "serious" stuff. The whole amateurish myth is nothing more than elitism. You're echoing the same tune saying that defending either BSD or GNU is religion.

I'll never dispute your Sun's credentials, but I pointed to you that you were rather unfair with both BSD amd GNU/Linux. We see many "players" contributing and the fact is that they're benefiting more.

Yes, so be it.

Why would you like me not to report how a system is often perceived ?
The fact that some of the reasons are not (or are not any more) justified doesn't give a reason to shoot the messenger.
About "amateur", okay, perhaps again a semantics issue. I didn't used the world "amateur" in a negative only way.
Amateur (from aimer: to like/to love) means someone who do something because he/she enjoys it, for its pleasure, and is opposed to professional which means someone who do something for a living.
While generally a professional is supposed to deliver a better quality work and an amateur a more unpredictible work, we certainly both agree this is not necessarily the case. No need to name software companies that are very good in delivering expensive crap. We also agree that individuals can produce extremely good software while doing it on their spare time.
The reality is companies trust more professionals for their mission critical tasks, not necessarily because the product is superior, but because they have a better confidence in the provider experience (design), and in its commitment to react and fix things (service).
They also make their choice according to requirements, and Solaris has simply a good history in complying these.

Linux, per se, is amateur, it started as a hobbyist project, and its development model is chaotic. I acknowledge some companies like Red-Hat are succeeding in hiding this chaos with a more professional work, I acknowledge some Unix vendors are more or less dropping their own Unix implementation toward Linux, perhaps just to surf the wave or may be because Linux has already surpassed their Unix in too many areas, but that doesn't change the bottom line: Linux is not following a professional development model. And again, that doesn't mean Linux is not a good O/S, on the opposite, Linux success demonstrates that a different model can generate a decent product.
Are you pretending the "cathedral vs bazaar" Linux development model is a myth ?
Well I think Unix is indeed the operating systems elite, and I'm defending its major open source representants: Linux, BSD and Solaris.
This isn't religion though, religion is often about blindly believing, I keep my eyes open.