I went to an OpenSolaris users group a few months ago just to see what was new in the OS. They had a nice dinner provided by Sun, and then proceeded to tell me

I went to an OpenSolaris users group a few months ago just to see what was new in the OS. They had a nice dinner provided by Sun, and then proceeded to tell me all about their new network stack, and some of the features it offers. My impression was that they are playing an extreme game of catch up to Linux. They were announcing features planned for release in 2010 that had been in the Linux kernel for years now. They're really trying to catch up to the virtualization offerings made by Xen and others in the Linux space. Granted, they have ZFS, and one other killer feature that I wish would make it into Linux: CacheFS - use an SSD or other fast storage device to front-end a large slow back-end disk based device. But Solaris and OpenSolaris are clearly operating systems that are in decline. It's apparent that the brain-drain from Sun over the years towards open source has left them with little innovation, which is sad. Layoffs throughout the last decade combined with good engineers that could get jobs elsewhere has probably left them with a staff of disgruntled, underpaid, underqualified, and mostly overseas developers. My big question is whether Oracle will continue with Solaris at all, or push towards Oracle Enterprise Linux. I know they say they will support Solaris, but to be honest, it makes more sense to just repackage Red Hat's code like they're doing now. You get all of the benefits of the open source community with very little software development budget.