Boosting Solaris

I was reading this interview focusing on multi-sided markets, recently. This one really struck me to think how Solaris can grow more - I'm an ardent fan of Solaris and I suppose that this great operating system is still not understood to a great extent.

A few things that Solaris can do to gain more importance and value ...

1. Since the source code is already open sourced, Sun should start o evalgalise more on the product and its features - it already has blogs and articles and some communities opened and moving on - what would be more better is call a meet of driver folks - give them a challenge to write drivers for more fancy peripherals - when this happens, there starts to be an adrenaline flow in the community to see what the OS offers - also, many companies would also try to leverage this to come and say that their product is being supported on Solaris. When products get supported on an OS and the OS supports the product, they go hand-in-hand to talk lot about the OS as well as the product.

2. Try to organise another event wherein a sort of hacking is allowed so that the OS code is hacked to run on embedded and other hardware plattforms other than being just a SPARC & x86 only product. When more platforms come in, people seem to get the idea of the vastness the OS can be on.

3. Try to engage the student community more - this is where we have the future developers - especially connect more with colleges/ Universities in countries like India & China where there is a huge base of software development. When students start to understand the OS in their college level, it becomes easy for them as future developers to hack the OS and bring it to a more better level.

Wow, love the one with Dtrace, ZFS, and etc.