At the end of 2006, ZDnet blogger Paul Murphy made what I thought at the time to be a poor prediction: That 2007 will see Sun's OpenSolaris eclipse Linux in the size and activity of its developer community, and all OS development projects, save Windows, will adopt OpenSolaris' organizational structure and licensing provisions.

Now that we're a few months into 2007, I still think that the prediction - if judged by the metric of whether it's likely to come true - was a lousy one. While Solaris is an awfully compelling OS, and while I'm convinced that the OpenSolaris effort is for real, I think that OpenSolaris has about as much a chance of pushing Linux to the sidelines this year as Linux has of knocking Windows off the mainstream desktop. That's not to say that either of these scenarios couldn't happen eventually, but 12 months is a pretty tight timeline.

Measures of accuracy aside, the prediction scores pretty well as a piece of writing, because I find that my thoughts often return to it, particularly when Sun makes a move that strikes me as either beneficial or deterimental to the forecast's eventual fulfillment.

Sun appears to have taken a step in the right direction recently when the firm hired Ian Murdock, the "ian" of Debian GNU/Linux, to fill the fanciful-sounding role of Chief Operating Platforms Officer. In a blog entry on the topic, Murdock described his new job as "head(ing) up operating system platform strategy," which sounds like a good perch from which to address my No. 1 Solaris peeve: software packaging.

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Sun's Latest Quandary: Courting or Competing? @ technewsworld.com