Why Solaris

if all the best features of Solaris is ported to its competition, why would anyone give a damn about Solaris?

#1 you can run the original for same price, why use a copy?

#2 Solaris isn't static, neither is any of these technologies, if you stay with the original you will always have the best maintained and latest features

#3 currently other projects are copying parts, with solaris you get the whole solution

#4 with solaris you can buy support if you need it, and it will be done by the people have access to the people that wrote the code not just the guy that ported it.

#5 Sun/Solaris gives you the whole stack, you can buy hardware, and get the OS and applications all from the same company.

#6 Sun/Solaris brings to the table stability, reliability, maintainability, before a change is made to Solaris code base, its reviewed by a group of people, not just one that glances over the patch, they actually inspect the change line by line and verify that the change is valid and they also catch new bugs this way before they are introduced.

#7 professionally created documentation. Not only howto's created by a weekend writer, but full documents by professional writers. The kind that with other operating systems you have to buy a book to get.

#8 testing, every nightly build of solaris is tested nightly, and compared with the previous builds, if its slower its a bug.

#9 Compatibility, Solaris has a stable API and ABI, so your application once it runs will continue to run for the foreseeable future. Solaris 10 runs programs that were released for Sun 2.5.1, if it doesn't work its a bug and needs to be fixed.

#10 Solaris has intergrated all the technologies to work together, so you don't end up with frankenstein with lots of parts from whereever, they are actually designed to work together. So you can use dtrace to monitor a zone running on top of a ZFS filesystem, that uses SMF to monitor the filesystem, the zone, the services in the zone, etc.