[Goladus]

I'm sure that moving off iSeries, etc. is a much more significant proposition than moving off of Solaris. But the barrier isn't zero. For an installation of any significant size it's almost certainly not going to be as simple as switching a deployment to legacy mode. You've got shell scripts to port, different configurations for core features like kickstart, firewalls, different package management. If you made an "environment standardization" bet on Solaris 10, you've got barriers to overcome.

But I'm not saying that Solaris is going to live. Just that, as someone who uses Solaris 10, Oracle seems to be tightening up. I think that they don't really care that much about Solaris and are just going to squeeze it dry. I'm far more worried what they're going to do with Java.

> In order to be kept alive, the Solaris boxes have to be able to perform tricks Linux boxes can't and, to a large extent, this is not the case.

True, but keep in mind that their competitors are often limited to "enterprise" distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu Server.