OPEN ENTERPRISE: Seven ways Solaris can beat Linux - Sun needs to make a splash if it wants to win back its Unix OS market share.

At a recent Sun Microsystems press event, Sun execs talked up plans to market the company's Solaris Unix OS to startups and small-to-midsize businesses. "Open source is what [customers] want to go after," said Peder Ulander, Sun's vice president of software marketing. "It's not so much Linux. Linux just happens to embody open source."

If that's true, then Sun should be in good shape. Solaris has been open source for two years now, and Sun is slowly but surely moving its entire software portfolio to an open source model. And yet, all the momentum still seems to be behind Linux.

True, Solaris is the technologically superior OS, but plainly that's not enough. …