6 Million Solaris licences shipped

Less than two years after the initial shipment of Solaris 10 six million licences were shipped. The Unix Guardian published an nice article about this moment in Solaris 10 Breaks Through 6 Million Shipment Barrier:

The download rate is far above Sun's initial plans, and Goguen admits that he thought the initial estimates that some Sun people were saying for Solaris 10 downloads seemed crazy at the time it was launched nearly two years ago. But Sun understood then that what matters to the future of its business is the number of contacts it has within companies--with servers, with Solaris, with Java, with middleware, with the executives that play golf and make decisions--that will count as much as revenue. And in that regard, Solaris 10 has done more than anyone could have expected.

And from a field view, the article is perfectly right. We talk with customers we never talked before about usages that were Linux domains in the last few years. And the enabler is Solaris 10 and it´s feature set. Some customers were attracted by ZFS, some by Solaris Zones …
(deutsche Version)