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How is SunOS vs Solaris doing now? Yes, they outran them for a while, but the only way Solaris is even surviving at all is because Sun returned it to an open l

• _delirium 13y ago
  I see it more in terms of user-years. Solaris got millions, FreeBSD got a tiny number. OS X now has quite a lot. The free BSDs have never been a serious force by comparison. It's not like you get to erase the 1980s and 1990s because the 2000s came after them, especially if nothing impressive happened in the 2000s either; enabling a decade+ of Solaris matters. I think Solaris did convincingly outrun BSD. Then they were both killed by Linux. FreeBSD might be doing slightly better on life support, but that is not a great consolation prize, when Solaris did much better in the prime of life. Although I'm not sure even today the free BSD derivatives have more users than the proprietary BSD spinoffs, if you add up AIX, Oracle Solaris, HPUX, etc. QNX and derivatives like Blackberry also include considerable BSD code.