Quite a few financial companies have mission critical apps running on solaris. If a large bunch of developers emerges who carry the solaris torch forward I think funding will not be a problem.
Since about 2005 most large banks have started deploying on Linux for most new projects. The place I'm at now, which is one of the most conservative environments - NIS, heaps of Sol 8 under Vintage support, 15 year old home grown perl scripts for config management, etc - has a minimal amount of Linux skills amongst the day to day support staff, just declared Solaris a non-strategic platform.
The question is how many banks do you need to subsidize the evolution of OpenSolaris/Illumos? Considering what a Sun/Oracle support contract costs, not many.
One of the incentives to use GPL-like licenses is that your competitors cannot take your contributions and run with them and, at the same time, have to make their contributions available to you.
This is the model that made Red Hat possible. It would not happen on top of BSD.
