OpenSolaris: Sun gets it certified and spread

Open Solaris 10 has received the Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL 4+).

What does it mean? Bill Vass, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Microsystems, wrote:

At Sun, we continue to lead with Certified Open Source Operating Systems that will run on X86/X64 or SPARC hardware from any vendor, at a lower support cost than RedHat.

The idea than seems to be making Open Solaris a viable alternative to the RH flavour of Linux.

Ambitious. Projects like Belenix might help, but there is no easy way to such goal.
Jonathan Schwartz about Open Solaris spread reported an effective picture showing all machines that connect back to Sun’s free update service.

Schwartz said that:

it doesn’t account for all Solaris 10 downloads, but shows the value of leveraging the internet to meet customers (new and old).

But as I already wrote turning users into real customers is not trivial.

My guess? Sun adopting a franchising business model, soon.