2010 Server OS Winners and Losers

"2010 was a pretty dramatic year in the server OS world, with one big name disappearing in a puff of logic, another selling itself off to the highest bidder, and a third joining Oracle's "evil" empire. And like any year, 2010 had some obvious winners, some downright losers, and a quite a few merchants of "meh." Here are the 8 most notable server OS developments that took place in 2010.

"Server OS Winners

"Solaris: 2009 was a pretty hair-raising year for Solaris. Sun was going down the pan; customers were defecting to HP, IBM, Red Hat and others in droves; and the whole future of the UNIX server OS was in doubt. Oracle's acquisition of Sun finally went through in January 2010, but that didn't stop the exodus of Sun engineers -- like Solaris lead developer Greg Lavender and DTrace developer Bryan Cantrill -- or customers defections.

"So how was Solaris a winner in 2010? Well, it now has a rich parent (Oracle), a strategy going forward (although many customers still don't know exactly what it is), and Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) believes it has what it takes to make Solaris the world's No. 1 Unix. That's a vast improvement over the predicament Solaris was in last year."

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