a. Existing customers already got their hands chopped, their prices raised, or their lawyers poked. They're stuck with an abusive, litigious, opaque vendor and will migrate out when they can. Many are stuck.
b. Prospective customers must have some compatibility need or they'd look elsewhere.
SmartOS, for example, is a more specialized application of the scions of OpenSolaris.
Here is a list of other distros that originated from the Illumos efforts after OpenSolaris was terminated:
-DilOS, with Debian package manager (dpkg + apt) and virtualization support, available for x86-64 and SPARC.
-NexentaStor, distribution optimized for virtualization, storage area networks, network-attached storage, and iSCSI or Fibre Channel applications employing the ZFS file system.
-OmniOS Community Edition, takes a minimalist approach suitable for server use.
-OpenIndiana, a distribution that is a continuation and fork in the spirit of the OpenSolaris operating system.
-SmartOS, a distribution for cloud computing with Kernel-based Virtual Machine integration.
-Helios, a distribution powering the Oxide Computer Rack.
-Tribblix, retro style distribution with modern components, available for x86-64 and SPARC.
-v9os, a server-only, IPS-based minimal SPARC distribution.
-XStreamOS, a distribution for infrastructure, cloud, and web development.
As a former SUN sysadmin/netadmin (from SunOS 4.1.4 days), I vaguely remember the Solaris releases after 2.5.1, maybe to another re-version/branding called Solaris 7, maybe? And then not paying any attention after Oracle absorbed it. I was honestly surprised enough by this headline to click TFA, simply because I did not think Solaris even existed anymore.
>I was honestly surprised enough by this headline to click TFA, simply because I did not think Solaris even existed anymore.
Oracle would never give up the opportunity to continue milking customers until they're comletely dry.
They did kill all future releases and blew up the SPARC roadmap. They also fired everyone working on new features and releases but kept enough of a skeleton crew to charge legacy customers outrageous support fees.
But for all practical intents and purposes, it's dead. One guy releasing things like "ls -sh now actually shows human readable output" being highlighted as a new feature kind of tells you everything you need to know.
it's mostly OmniOS/SmartOS and other Illumos (descendant of OpenSolaris) distributions. All the Solaris 11 deployments i was aware of in mid-late 2010s are now either migrated to some sort of container setup of running on OmniOS.
A few places, Fujitsu also has Solaris servers, and if you care about security, Solaris SPARC is the only production UNIX with hardware memory tagging in active use since 2015.
Either way, SPARC and the entire family seem to be entirely dead in the grand scheme of things. I don't know why anyone would develop for this platform.
Illumos/OpenSolaris etc are great and install about as easily as FreeBSD, on desktop and server systems with Ethernet. Other stuff like WiFi etc is not as well supported.
It’s still my favorite OS, if it fits what I need it for.
Started using Solaris 7 in college when Sun made it available for free. All you had to do was fill out a web form! I absolutely loved it. To this day it remains my favorite OS to use. I love macOS and its ease of use (plus its Unix-ish support) but there's something about Solaris that always made me feel like I was doing "real" work.
I haven't used Solaris since the last time I used it for work over 10 years ago. Agree ZFS and Zones are both exceptional, I would still use Solaris now where it made sense.
The Oracle business model is to rope you into a contract, set you up for failure, ignore you until you violate a license agreement, then sue you and rope you into another contract to avoid the lawsuit. If you're an Oracle customer, prepare to get sued... for something... anything really.
