> ...It can refer to market share like you argue, but in a broader sense, this is at least how I understood the term eating someone's lunch.
It's still a far stretch to claim that zones win against containers. They could if we limited the field to just technical level, and then again, I would need to see some arguments why they actually are better.
>> So, zones provide better platform because people can go back and learn Solaris? Or what?
> No, Solaris [...] provides a better platform for learning and understanding UNIX.
You're confusing here learning unix with using it.
If one was at the stage of learning, Solaris could be fine, except there's much less material about it for newbies (especially about rough corners and stupid troubles, like "I ran `chmod -R 777 /'" or "I deleted my kernel"), and much, much less knowledgable people accessible to those newbies to learn from.
Now look at professional Linux sysadmins and programmers. They already have some knowledge about their OS and they're not likely to do a hard turn for different OS just for the sake of "understanding UNIX", as it would require quite large effort to just get to the point where they are already with Linux. Solaris would need to provide a really compelling function or feature to justify this effort, and all you said is "portability" (which most probably won't be necessary in most cases) and vague notion of "understanding UNIX".
EDIT: It was a little dishonest on my side to suggest that main selling points of Solaris derivatives were "understanding UNIX" and "writing portabile code". Solaris introduced ZFS and DTrace. But while it is said that ZFS with zones work well together, it still needs explaining why is it a significantly better combination than what Linux provides, and DTrace seems like a very distant benefit, less compelling each time a tool like Sysdig shows up.
