When Jim McHugh spoke with Paul Krill of InfoWorld a few months ago, he was confident that Solaris would more than hold its own against possible inroads by Linux. The Sun VP for Solaris Marketing said the anecdotal evidence was mixed, given that, for every Unix-to-Linux convert, it was fairly easy to identify a user who made the trip in the other direction.

Improved software performance, availability and security give Solaris an edge in the Unix market sector, McHugh asserted. That has led such companies as Glasses Direct, Sapotek and the ZhengTu Network to migrate to Solaris. Add Predictive Self-Healing and features such as DTrace and you have a compelling package in Solaris.

Krill writes that McHugh disputes the contention of Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin that the last men standing will be Linux and Windows. McHugh said such an assertion requires some refinement, noting that if one is talking about open source in general versus Windows, then Zemlin is right. But kernel-to-kernel, McHugh said, Solaris can stand up against Linux.

McHugh also disputed IDC's figures on Solaris shipments, pointing out that IDC must have been counting hardware shipment totals rather than Solaris downloads, to which they would have no access. He persisted in his claim that licenses of Solaris 10 OS number in the neighborhood of 13 million.

Distinguishing between Solaris and OpenSolaris in terms of the frequency of their respective releases, McHugh said there are really two different use cases involved. One is inside the enterprise, where ongoing support is called for, and the other is in areas such as Web 2.0, where developers can build experimental applications and test them thoroughly prior to release.

McHugh suggested that it was to the advantage of Solaris that Linux does not use CDDL licensing, which means that Linux users cannot avail themselves of such attractive features as ZFS and DTrace. He also reminded Krill that Sun does license products under GPL, such as Java technology. Further, Sun is a member of the Linux foundation and keeps up to date on the evolution of GPL, he added.

In any case, Solaris has vocal advocates in the user community, McHugh said, which perhaps provokes a response from Linux users that has not been noted earlier. "Maybe that's why we're seeing more activity where people feel a need to come out really strongly and make strong statements against Solaris, because there's a growing base of supporters of Solaris who are defending it," he said.

McHugh also disagreed that there are fewer capable Solaris admins than Linux admins. Solaris has a large and strong system admin community, he said, adding that, "By adopting the Gnome look and feel and the standard open source user interface, it's just as easy to administer OpenSolaris as it is any Linux distro because you're using the same components. You're using the same user interface. You're using the same packaging system approach for getting software and updating software."

And, no, despite the Solaris platform being 16-years old, there are no current plans for a radical revamping of the OS. Instead, with built-in binary compatibility, more and more applications are becoming available on Solaris 10 than on any other component.

Linux has standardization issues involving Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu that Solaris/OpenSolaris users are spared, McHugh contended.

The continuing collaboration between Sun and Intel and Sun and AMD are making for a healthy environment for the development of Solaris x86, McHugh noted. "If you're looking for an OS where a chip manufacturer can get their innovations included really quickly, OpenSolaris is probably the leading OS from that standpoint," he said.

Finally, as to Solaris on the desktop, McHugh recalled that traditional Solaris was very strong in the workstation space but that OpenSolaris is moving up strongly in the desktop space.

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