It is dying, though. No one wants to be beholden to Oracle.
Outside Oracle, the various efforts to use OpenSolaris derived stuff are constantly fragmented and overall shrinking in size. What little effort there is to improve things is often duplicative between the three+ branches of effort. Hardware support is more marginal than ever on OpenSolaris derived stuff.
Less and less important software compiles under and works well under it, and it's getting harder and harder to run.
"What little effort there is to improve things is often duplicative between the three+ branches of effort."
That's funny, because I'm on the mailing lists for illumos and SmartOS and I see that everything generally useful impemented in SmartOS ends up upstream in illumos. Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
It's true that less and less software compiles on Solaris 10. I have to spend time patching badly written software to get it to compile. I have however not noticed any performance impact, on the contrary, that same software runs faster on Solaris 10 (and by extension illumos and therefore SmartOS) than on GNU/Linux where it has been developed, which is a slap in the face of GNU/Linux crowd hacking on that trash fire.
SmartOS is a different story, completely different: they use pkgsrc and their library is 15,000+ packages. So the argument here is mis-information. Presumably, this is being done on purpose, "because Linux"?
Outside Oracle, the various efforts to use OpenSolaris derived stuff are constantly fragmented and overall shrinking in size. What little effort there is to improve things is often duplicative between the three+ branches of effort. Hardware support is more marginal than ever on OpenSolaris derived stuff.
Less and less important software compiles under and works well under it, and it's getting harder and harder to run.