Having worked in a Solaris shop for a while, I still wonder what could have been if Solaris made the decision to open-source about 5-10 years earlier than they did. I think Solaris would have been such a better base for the Linux ecosystem than Linux ever was. Though the licensing issues had to have been resolved for this to work out, and knowing Sun/Oracle - that would never have really worked out...

What's-his-name, the Sun CEO, hated both Microsoft and Open Source.

Even when they open sourced Solaris, after he left, they did it as a half-measure with an anti-GPL license and then I think Oracle pulled the plug and doomed Solaris to the dustbin of history.

McNealy was "just" chairman of the board when OpenSolaris was released. Also, I'm not sure it's fair to describe CDDL as anti-GPL unless you think the Mozilla Public License is as well.

That said, it is reasonable to ask whether Solaris should have simply been placed under the GPL or a permissive license.

I think it’s fair. They went out of their way to make the license incompatible so it couldn’t be mixed with GPL’ed code.

Had they moved sooner to open source, and embraced it instead of trying to create a moat around their stuff, they probably could’ve stayed relevant.

Ok, to rephrase that. They licensed Open Solaris in a certain way to make it explicitly incompatible with Linux' GPL2, or at least to sow enough doubt that the licenses are incompatible.

That didn't scream confidence in their ability to migrate to Open Source or their overall technical superiority, despite some very nice features.

>such a better base for the Linux ecosystem than Linux ever was.

That's so true.

But OmniOS and OpenIndiana still work excellent.

I was surprised by the success of Linux around 2000.

NT or Solaris were actually better and BSD variants had been around for a while.

Samba and Apache were the driving forces back then. In Germany, SUSE had great influence.

But Linux success is still amazing.