This may be true, but when Oracle killed OpenSolaris, my non-Sun/Oracle friends wrote off Solaris and moved off it.

Killing OpenSolaris, and talking up SPARC so much, made people think that a) Larry just wants to vendor lock them, b) doesn't care about x86 support because it makes vendor lock-in harder for Oracle, c) the OpenSolaris derivative community will not be able to compete with Linux. So everyone has grudgingly accepted that Linux is it for the enterprise Unix market.

I hate this as much as you do. I <3 Solaris/Illumos. Illumos derivatives have their niches, no doubt, and I want to be able to use them much more. But that's not how business people think.

I'm not sure that Oracle could turn this impression around at this point. To begin with it would have to restart OpenSolaris, and that might not be enough. OpenSolaris greatly helped Sun overcome resistance to Solaris, but it only went so far, so Oracle will have to do even more work to make Solaris' future bright.

This blog post is as relevant today as ever: https://blogs.oracle.com/bmc/the-economics-of-software

(And yes, it's STILL hosted at blogs.oracle.com. I'm almost afraid of mentioning it: who knows, it might get removed if Oracle execs notice it.)