Good attitude for targeting 100% binary compatibility, we could say that it will be same 'way' as CentOS is for the RHEL distro ... and that is propably best choice they can make.
Pity they do not have an OS itself (no working ISO images, just codebase), but that is a good start.
I agree that Unix market share is diminishing, but I think you are wrong on many parts.
According to a survey on behalf of HP, Solaris has the brightest future:
http://www.itpro.co.uk/623683/unix-s...PRO+-+Today%29
"According to the Coleman Parkes findings, the current operating system of choice for mission-critical systems is Solaris... HP-UX was in second place, followed by Windows."
It means that Solaris still has lots of customers and it is most used by all Unixes. Solaris has been shipped 13 million times, and OpenSolaris also several million times. All in all, Solaris/OpenSolaris has been shipped in almost 20 million licenses.
Solaris is the reference platform OS for Oracle database - this was outspoken long before Oracle bought Sun.
Regarding BTRFS and FTrace or Systemtap - they are just copies. Solaris shows the way and ZFS and DTrace are provenly good and delivers today. Linux may have grand plans for the Solaris copies, but I doubt Linux devs will succeed. For instance, BTRFS will always be lagging behind ZFS. It takes at least 5 years, before version 1.0 of filesystem is let into the server halls. When BTRFS is v1.0 it will take another 5 years of debugging and development before it is let into the server halls. Meanwhile, ZFS will continue development and new functionality. BTRFS will always lag behind.
And, does BTRFS provide data safety like ZFS does? I doubt that. I think that if Oracle where serious about BTRFS, then Oracle would dedicate a full team, not like now: one full time paid developer. I think Oracle will bet on the original: ZFS and let BTRFS handle it self. ZFS is better than BTRFS, why develop two identical products, and one product is a copy of the other?
Who cares about what Solaris has to offer? What matters is that as much software as possible is free software. That alone justifies the project in my book.
Backup what? A research paper saying that "BTRFS is a copy of ZFS"? Are you serious?
Would you like me to ask you:
"Are there any research papers that say "Linux scales well" or "Linux is stable"? No? Then it is pure FUD to frighten Linux' competitors".
Not very clever, heh?
Nope, it was OpenSolaris. I was in the same boat as this guy:
http://openfoo.org/blog/opensolaris_...y_updates.html
Updates counted as "support" and you needed to subscribe and pay.