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Clearly, the costs involved in running Solaris and RHEL platforms are not well understood, and generally favors GNU/Linux environments. This is (most of the time) untrue, since this tend to be based on personal user experience, which is in fact far different from running lots of systems in high demand production data centers.

Here some interesting readings on these subjects--costs and features analysis--from:

• Jim Laurent, OS Ambassador within Sun and evangelist for the Solaris OS
  Solaris 10 costs less than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and does more)
• Paul Murphy, an IT consultant specializing in Unix and related technologies
  Cost comparison: Solaris/SPARC vs Linux/x86
• Marc Andreessen, creator of the Mosaic web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications
  Solaris is a better Linux than Linux
• Bill Vass, President and Chief Operating Officer of Sun Federal
  UPDATED Solaris vs. RHEL Comparison - to include Microsoft Windows

YMMV for sure, but I personally think that Solaris costs are overestimated, and its features are mostly unknown, or at least underused... but this is a very large and hot topic nowadays, I know.

Update #1 (2008-11-14): Go to read interesting comment update from Jim Laurent.

Update #2 (2008-12-02): Go to read Joerg Moellenkamp's entry about similar points.

Update #3 (2008-12-03): Go to read this article appearing in Computerworld.com.