
Wow! With Solaris 10, Sun Microsystems has done a marvelous job of bringing Solaris fully into the x86 world. Gone are the days when Solaris only runs on Sun hardware or when it only runs well on Sun hardware. Solaris 10 comes with greatly expanded off-the-shelf x86 hardware compatibility and a license that is hard to beat. It's a binary right to use and Open Solaris, the open source version is soon to come. IT Managers that have been wanting to bring a stable, scalable Operating Environment into their network infrastructures, but who have been unwilling to commit to the Sun hardware platform, for various reasons, are now free, pun intended, to bring Solaris on board and to run it on the hardware of their choice.
Torvalds nailed it when he said that opening up Solaris didn't mean THAT much... x86 support is still terrible (haven't been able to install it on 3 different boxes that are all linux/windows friendly) so you're either stuck with a shortlist of x86 components or Sun HW. I hope Sun improves in this area, as it would be great to bring the advanced OS features to the desktop for developers like myself =)