From my perspective, if this rumor is true, it's a relief. Solaris died the moment that they made the source proprietary -- a decision so incredibly stupid that it still makes my head hurt six years later.
Fortunately, Solaris was open long enough that we in the open source world were able to fork it with illumos[1]. And because illumos became the home for many of us that brought Solaris its most famous innovations (e.g., ZFS, DTrace and zones), it should come as no surprise that we've continued to innovate over the last six years. (Speaking only for Joyent, we added revolutionary debugging support for node.js[2], ported KVM to it[3], completed and productized Linux-branded zones[4], added software-defined networking[5] and developed first-class Docker integration[6] -- among many, many other innovations.)
So illumos (and derivatives like SmartOS, OmniOS and DelphixOS) is vibrant and alive -- but one of our biggest challenges has been its association with the name "Solaris": I don't think of our system as Solaris any more than I think of it as "SVR4" or "SunOS" or "7th Edition" or any of its other names -- and the very presence of Solaris has served to confuse. And indeed, it is my good fortune to be working with a new generation of engineers on the operating system -- engineers for whom the term "Solaris" is entirely distant and its presence as an actual (if proprietary) system befuddling.
So if the rumor is true (and I suspect that it is), it will allow everyone to know what we have known for six years: Solaris is dead, but its innovative spirit thrives in illumos. That said, I do hope that Oracle does the right thing and (re)opens Solaris -- allowing the East Berliners of proprietary Solaris to finally rejoin us their brethren in the free west of illumos!
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc
[2] https://github.com/joyent/mdb_v8
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwAfJywzk8o
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs
[5] http://dtrace.org/blogs/rm/2014/09/23/illumos-overlay-networ...
[6] https://www.joyent.com/blog/triton-docker-and-the-best-of-al...
A quickie take can be found on LX zones in this slideshare deck, also by bcantrill http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/illumos-lx
Big fan of Solaris and zones, though at the moment using a mix of other technologies.
One thing I did notice about Solaris at least in the Linux 2.6.x days: Solaris is amazing at handling low-memory situations. Once I logged into a server that was swapping continuously via SSH and had about 2MB RAM left over - it was still somewhat response; while under Linux of that era it would have bogged down under the same situation.
Even current Linux kernels behave very poorly under memory pressure (ssee the various 'kswapd 100% CPU issues', but also many issues with OOM, kernel panics and so on).