"SAN FRANCISCO -- Sun Microsystems is pondering whether or not to offer Solaris code in an open-source format to boost deployment of the operating system on Intel hardware, but questions remain about the effectiveness of open source, a Sun official said this week.... The company is looking at allowing users to access Solaris in an open-source format, noting that the recent early release program for Solaris 9 on the Intel x86 platform has generated about 1.4 million downloads for the $20 offering, said Jonathan Schwartz, Sun executive vice president for software. Schwartz spoke during an interview Tuesday evening prior to a private Sun-sponsored screening of the film "Solaris" in San Francisco."

Solaris is something that I have been thinking about looking into more for a long time, but Sun Hardware is just so expensive when compared to PC hardware of a similar power, and its support for i386 hardware was pretty limited the last time I looked. But it does have the potential to become somewhat like Linux if it went down the open source route, and I think that many people would be interested in this.

More here.