Solaris is no longer free

this doesn't change the status of OpenSolaris.

Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that position.

But, on the flip side (and I say this as someone who learned Unix on SunOS 2.6 in 1998 - I still type ps -ef, and as a Joyent user, though tcsh has given way to bash in my finger memory) - Solaris really is an edge operating system for the masses, somewhat more akin to AIX. Pretty much the common (server) OS for the masses is Linux, with Open/Free/NetBSD making up the majority of those not going with Windows.

The only people I know using Solaris these days (and this is just an anecdote, so be gentle :-) are people running Oracle or other environments that need to be enterprise robust on vertically scaled system, people using sparc gear, or people who have a legacy investment in Solaris. This is sad - as few as five years ago, Solaris was still a popular choice for new companies - the OS was just so rock solid stable.

I'd love to hear a YC survey on OS choices for server backends - my bet is 50%+ on Linux/BSD, less than 10% Solaris.

I'm wondering what percentage of the remaining 40% is Windows, and if AIX ever gets a vote. I'm presuming HPUX is not chosen for new companies any more, and I fervently pray that everyone steers clear of SCO.

DTrace would be nice for starters.

I'm sure you already know, but DTrace is in FreeBSD.

Personally I've migrated from FreeBSD to Ubuntu for my at home server tasks. At work, I've seen a variety of deployments, never one of Solaris. I'd say 30% Windows, 60% Linux, 10% FreeBSD (instance installs (host and vm's), not including embedded systems like routers) is what I've seen over the past 5 years are work.

Of Linux I've seen SUSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu widely used. I've seen deliveries of Sun Servers with Solaris installed that were wiped to be replaced with Linux.

On the Windows side, I've seen environments where it's Windows Server heavy require drastically more resources to maintain, but that's another conversation.

Of course this is all anecdotal as I've also never seen anyone deploy OSX Server in any capacity :)

What I really think it is, is people use what they are familiar with or what they can get support for. Solaris has disappeared mostly from the desktop, so people are less familiar.

Hell the last time I tried to experiment with OpenSolaris I couldn't get it booted in VMware (graphical corruption), so I never had a chance to get familar with it myself.

To bad too, DTrace and ZFS always sounded fantastic.