Get your Solaris 5.11... sorta. OpenSolaris is finally a secret no longer. Many months of hard work by a small team of people (mostly at Sun) has produced an almost completely open future development branch of the truly enterprise class operating system we all know an love (or least me and it's my blog) Solaris!

Solaris has been in my life since I started computing in college in 1994. Yes, that makes me young to some. I was an sysadmin on SunOs 4.1.3 and Solaris 2.{3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}. Unlike many other operating systems I can say that my entire experience with Solaris has been positive. SunOs 4.1.3 was not my friend, but I thought even Solaris 2.3 had some great things going.

After dealing with Sun kernel engineers on and off over the last 10 years, I've come to realize that I can only hope to accel and be as good at my job as they are at theirs. Truly astounding understanding of the fields in which they play.

People have been talking up the technologies in Solaris 10 for a while and some people say it's dumb, or not as clever as X or Y or Z. Those that know me know that I am a man that follows "The Right Tool for the Job" mantra religiously. I develop on Linux. FreeBSD, Solaris and Mac OS X on a daily basis and I even had a heavy hand in the initial port of the Ecelerity Enterprise MTA to Microsfot Windows. I like to believe I can see technologies without clouded vision and speak to both their advantages and disadvantages.

Solaris 10 is an amazing piece of technology. OpenSolaris allows much more liberal use of the technology. I've spent months now reviewing the OpenSolaris code base and I am more grateful than ever that Sun has chosen to follow path that provide me (and others) access to their hard work.

Is it the right tool for the job? Is it better than everything else? Clearly not. However, it is certainly the right tool for many jobs and I highly suggest you dig in and take a look. You'll like what you see and an educated person make better decisions going forward. Use this as an opportunity to take you Linux/FreeBSD/Foo/Quux blinders off and explore a new technology -- you won't be sorry.