I would agree, if Gnome weren't being supported by Sun and touted as their new GUI. It's currently a nightmare to build on Solaris. This is certainly partly Sun's fault, although CDE is as much of a nightmare as Gnome, for greatly different reasons.

And what's your problem with Solaris x86? It's basically identical to Solaris Sparc as far as application developers are concerned. I'll admit that its hardware support can be a little lacking, but it's a great OS.

I'd say that application developers should be interested in making their application available to as many people as possible. Otherwise, why bother making it public? As to how far in the future to support an OS, I'd say to support it as long as there are a good number of people using it. How many folks are using SunOS<5 or Ultrix or DGUX? Very few. How many people are using Solaris, even Solaris x86? Lots.

Which, of course, avoids my point that Sun is putting money into Gnome and Gnome still seems to have little interest in making it run well on Sun's platforms.