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O'Reilly Radar Entry
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/new_sour ce_licenses_from_micro.html

O'Reilly Radar Entry
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/10/new_sour ce_licenses_from_micro.html

You could try a service like books24x7 - it doesn't look cheap at $399 a year for an 'ITPro' but I have a corporate sub at work which I can use at home. It's pretty good.
Then there's safari from o'reilly. which starts at $180 a year. The O'Reilly service is limited to the number of books you can have available at once and how often they can be changed. With books24x7 you have access to all the books at once. I don't know which has a better range - I suspect O'Reilly has a slightly better range but I like the flexibility of books24x7.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

most remarkably virii and malware manage to get unkillable quite easily. Flaky security or the unability to chmod your stuff may have something to do with it.

A lot of malware isn't unkillable in the traditional sense. What it does is run 2 processes that act as a watchdog for each other. Kill one and the other one starts it back up. They probably got the idea from MS even -- back in the day Windows used two system threads that watched out for each other and kept you from tweaking the registry key to turn NT Workstation into NT Server.

A technique I like to use for killing those is to find the EXE file that is being re-launched every time you kill it. You won't be able to delete it because of Win32's breaindead filesystem semantics, but you can change permissions on it to deny access to everyone. Then when you kill one of the processes, the other one isn't able to start it back up. I've yet to see any malware smart enough to change permissions back on the file, so for now anyway it's an effective way to kill them.

girls love men that can cook.

Tried that. They run a mile when they see this in my bookshelves.

If you want to give your site's visitors a simple way to contact you without losing your email addess to the spam harvesting "folks" (not to mention without forcing your visitors to fire up a client they probably don't even have configured with a mailto link), just set up a simple form and use simple php to make it convenient for them to reach you while keeping your email address safely tucked away.

Though this is only possibly with PHP, ideally running on a Debian system, it's the most important language to learn in the universe. For a starter's guide, check out this site.

I suggest exposing them to the kind of tools that are used to develop real open source (and closed) projects: version control, build tools, test harnesses, bug tracking, and installation tools. Even if their 5K LOC program could be compiled using a shell script, show them what they would use when it becomes 50K LOC.

There's even a new book from O'Reilly about these kinds of tools - "Practical Development Environments" (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/practicalde). I wrote it because I couldn't find a similar book for software toolsmiths.

I co-authored an O'reilly book on the subject called Open Source for the Enterprise that may give you further ideas.

On some cables, the arrows do (allegedly) serve a purpose. If a pre-amp and a subwoofer are both grounded, a distinctive, quite audible 60 Hz hum can be heard. Supposedly, the arrow laden cable is only grounded at one end (the pre-out), breaking the ground loop

And the article dares to justify its "assuptions" by comparing Java against a language interpreter such as Perl.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

I'm glad to see someone else raise this point. It was part of a discussion I led last week at the Software Development Best Practices conference in Boston, and also appears in my new O'Reilly book "Practical Developments Environments" (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/practicalde). Enough of the plugging, here's my take on the problem. I've done both #1 and #2 and want to see someone do #3.

1. Most people clone or link multiple bugs together to represent the bug in each release. This seems heavyweight, and may lead to bug numbers changing for each release, which could confuse customers.

2. Other people add more fields (ToBeFixedIn_1, ToBeFixedIn_2, ...). As was pointed out, this makes generating reports painful.

3. What really should happen is that some application has to keep track of which build the bug appeared in, which build it was discovered in, and how each build is related to other builds. A picture would look like a tree with branches for each release. The key is to assume that a bug still exists in the all builds and branches after it is discovered, until confirmed not to exist.

With this information, you could ask the key question "which build or releases does this bug exist in?". Fixing the bug in a certain release updates this information. It's doesn't seem too much more work, except that when you create a new branch, you have to associate the new builds with the branch.

Buy a copy of DNS and BIND, Fourth Edition. Know what you are talking about before you let your fingers make you look bad.

> ...speech by RMS on how the Lisp Machine influenced his decision to start the free software movement.

I always thought it was pot. Live & learn.

"I didn't like the counter culture much," Stallman admits. "I didn't like the music. I didn't like the drugs. I was scared of the drugs. I especially didn't like the anti-intellectualism, and I didn't like the prejudice against technology. After all, I loved a computer. And I didn't like the mindless anti-Americanism that I often encountered. There were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, they had to support the North Vietnamese. They couldn't imagine a more complicated position, I guess."

Such comments alleviate feelings of timidity. They also underline a trait that would become the key to Stallman's own political maturation. For Stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. By 1970, Stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. Nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. In the process of doing so, Stallman had found the logic wanting. Although opposed to the war in Vietnam, Stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice. Rather than widen the breach between himself and his peers, however, Stallman elected to keep the analysis to himself.

Speeding up Acrobat 6 by disabling (unneeded) plugins:

http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=2005 5
http://hacks.oreilly.com/pub/h/2347

It's also worth noting that when you start Acrobat/Acrobat Reader, by default it phones home to check for application and plugin updates. You can block the application from getting 'net access, but in comparison to the plugin issue, this delay is so minor, why bother worrying about it?

I started out as a computer trainer at the time that the first in the Dummies series came out - DOS for Dummies. As much as the series is now rather overdone, I have to admit that Dan Gookin and IDG had come up with an excellent formula for regular folks to learn technology. Dummies' competition at the time were gargantuan software books by Queue and Wiley that often were padded with lengthy chapters of software esoterica. Instead, the Dummies books focused on how to get things done rather using specific software than enumerating all of the software's features. They then used a layout to make the books both readable as well as useful as a quick reference.

I think O'Reilly has picked that up some tricks in their Cookbook series as well as the Head First series to a lesser degree. Both series use layouts appropriate for their respective audiences. As others have mentioned, O'Reilly has likewise been good at focusing on the essentials of a technology.

Overall, I give kudos to anyone who can make computer technology more useful to human beings.

I started out as a computer trainer at the time that the first in the Dummies series came out - DOS for Dummies. As much as the series is now rather overdone, I have to admit that Dan Gookin and IDG had come up with an excellent formula for regular folks to learn technology. Dummies' competition at the time were gargantuan software books by Queue and Wiley that often were padded with lengthy chapters of software esoterica. Instead, the Dummies books focused on how to get things done rather using specific software than enumerating all of the software's features. They then used a layout to make the books both readable as well as useful as a quick reference.

I think O'Reilly has picked that up some tricks in their Cookbook series as well as the Head First series to a lesser degree. Both series use layouts appropriate for their respective audiences. As others have mentioned, O'Reilly has likewise been good at focusing on the essentials of a technology.

Overall, I give kudos to anyone who can make computer technology more useful to human beings.

Surely you can't be serious! They're at least as distinctive as the Foo for Dummies books -- it's difficult to miss a book with the title in a big colored box, with a pretty animal woodcut underneath it.

It's like picking up a book with "Don't Panic" printed in nice friendly letters on the cover and wondering what it could be...

Tim Oreilly has a blog...

http://radar.oreilly.com/tim/

the other posters are interesting as welll

http://radar.oreilly.com/

Tim Oreilly has a blog...

http://radar.oreilly.com/tim/

the other posters are interesting as welll

http://radar.oreilly.com/

O'Reilly books cannot be downloaded through Safari. They are HTML only, page by page.

I thought there was an option for downloading chapters for offline viewing in PDF format.

Here is the entire text with the missing paragraph and some comments by Tim O'Reilly. And no registration is needed.

The first is their Open Books project which includes out-dated, out-of-print, or community produced texts.

The second is their embracing of the Founder's copyright, under which they will release hundreds of books in decades to come, in collaboration with their authors.

It would be great if those books were released earlier, but at least they have taken a stance on releasing them earlier than necessary.

The New York TImes actually cut out a paragraph because of a 750 word limit, the full text, including a key paragraph on why this is actually beneficial for authors and publishers is here:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/09/ny_times _op_ed_on_authors_guil.html

Not only that, but O'Reilly already has a service that allows his books to be searched just like Google wants to do.

So not only is he not a hypocrit, but he beat google to it.

Of course Tim O'Reilly is going to in favor of the Google Library Project. O'Reilly's Safari Bookshelf is already putting the content of books online (for a fee though).

Yeah, but how do you know that WebSideStory's numbers aren't taken from sites that attract mostly Windows-only users? For all we know, some of the sites that they monitor could exclude all non-IE browsers.

That seems highly unlikely, given that many of WSS's customers are large global corporations that have big, professionally-created websites- Disney, Best Buy, Fox News, Bank of America, Freddie Mac- a wide range of clients in a variety of sectors. Surely some of their sites exclude non-IE browsers, but they are unlikely to make a significant difference in WSS's numbers.

But my point was not that WebSideStory's numbers are accurate, although by the fact that it is their business to know this kind of stuff and they seem to have been around a while I tend to believe them, but merely that the visitors to your site are not likely to be anywhere near a representative sample of the internet at large. There's lots of info out there that seems to corroborate WSS's numbers. Your little window on the world is nowhere near the big picture that WSS is seeing.

Google used to list this stuff in their zeitgeist, but they seem to have stopped that. Too bad...

noise tripping this flag seems unlikely Other commentary on O'reilly blog

http://downloads.oreilly.com/make/ipodlinux.mov

that he'll post the review to Eclipse (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/eclipse/index.html released a year ago) around Xmas.

There's no reason why learning Emacs has to be intimidating, but it's misleading comments like this that make people believe that they don't understand Emacs.

Do us all a favor and compare the Emacs Manual Table of Contents with the Learning GNU Emacs Table of Contents.

The Emacs manual begins with an encyclopedic glossary of Emacs terms. 17 pages of terms, according to "Print Preview" in Firefox. Afterwards, you get index pages: a list of all the default keys, a list of all the default options (without even a link to a chapter explaining how to tweak an option), a command index (again, no info on how to run a command), a variable index (same deal), and a "concept index" full of links all over the manual. Finally you get to a very abstract section about how to interpret what's on the Screen, but still no information on how to actually use Emacs.

The O'Reilly book begins with "Emacs Basics", an easy-to-follow guide to the beginnings of Emacs. It looks more like the Emacs tutorial in a plain text format.

The Emacs "Manual" is a gigantic man page. It's not a "manual" in the sense that you're supposed to sit down and read it as a first introduction to Emacs. It's not a guide for people to read. It's a reference guide for you to go find information you already knew was there.

I'll admit, the built-in tutorial is a much better introduction, but it leaves you at the novice level. You know how to push the cursor around, but you know *nothing* about how to set options, what a variable is, how to set them, etc. To get from here to there requires hours of reading random info pages to try to find what you're looking for. Nothing like reading a clear manual.

Never recommend that a newbie to Emacs read the Emacs Manual. The Manual is for Intermediate users wishing to become Advanced. The Tutorial is for novices. For those wishing to get to the Intermediate level, this O'Reilly book isn't a half bad choice.

Well played, dunandgroup. I like the subtle way you substituted your own Amazon-whoring referral link where the original quote included the following link to "our vi book":

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/vi6/

And you even got modded informative for posting a word-for-word copy of a single paragraph from the O'Reilly site! Well trolled!

Despite emacs' higher profile as a free software poster child, I think more people actually use vi than emacs. We sell more copies of our vi book than of our emacs book -- almost twice as many each year. This could be because emacs has a free manual that is distributed with it. But I saw a matching statistic at Linux Expo, where O'Reilly sponsors a vi vs. emacs paintball game each year. I happened to check the signup list, and noticed that there were about twice as many people signed up for the vi team as for the emacs team. (Maybe they just like the vi t-shirt -- the team "uniform" -- more than the emacs t-shirt, but I don't think so.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Wow, nobody here has even suggested the most logical place to start: by learning the relational model, the only complete theoretical model for data manipulation and retrieval. (The suggestions to "use MySQL" are frightening, to say the least).

Or maybe they just assume since you are CS, you understand the RM? I've been burned several times making that assumption. So here's my advice, buy this book and master the content within. I choose that one because 1) Chris Date is one of the few people who actually has a deep understanding of the RM 2) it's short (240 pages) 3) it's well-written (as is all of Date's stuff) and 4) it's on O'Reilly which is comforting to people who are afraid of theory books (in fact I was surprised to see O'reilly pick up a book that wasn't about "hacks" or a "cookbook", kudos, we need more books that teach principles that can be applied to any product).

Only then should you proceed to learning any particular product (and yes, Oracle is just a product, not a "technology", or a religion for that matter).

I like Mastering Oracle SQL from O'Reilly. It assumes no previous familiarity with SQL.

If you are looking to do stored procedures, it touches briefly on PL/SQL (Procedural Language/Structured Query Language), which an Oracle proprietary language, but does not explain it in depth.

For SQL, and specifically explaining Oracle's quirks and proprietary functions, it is very good.

The curl up under a tree, leave it on the bus arguments are spot on - for novels.

The ctrl-f comment is spot on - for tech books.

While people flog away at the first problem, why not enjoy a great solution to the second? Oreilly's Safari.

Sure, DRM, rent-not-buy, etc etc, but online errata, search, and 15 bucks a month for 10 books on the shelf is pretty fantastic. Am I really going to treasure that copy of "Javascript: The definitive guide - 4th edition"? Also, it's great for books you may not want. Am I going to use this technology on this project? Lets look at these 3 books on it. No? Oh well, let's drop them and get some others.

http://safari.oreilly.com/

Here is a link to Learning Oracle. Here is a link to all of their oracle titles.

Here is a link to Learning Oracle. Here is a link to all of their oracle titles.

Ugh. There's a lot to like about C#, but I would never call it beautiful. It's got more keywords than C++, it's chock full of silly features (did you know you can use a keyword as an identifier if you prefix it with @?), and, most egregiously, Microsoft commonly pollutes the language to make up for deficiencies in their toolset.

(Oh, and Spotlight is a lot deeper than just a nice interface on top of the existing search.)

You might also be surprised by what AppleScript is capable of. It has support for very modern features, including inheritance, exceptions, closures, eval... It's not meant to be the shell - that's why OS X ships with bash, tcsh, and zsh. It's more like VB Script, except vastly nicer and easier to write. (Your criticism of its syntax is dead on, but believe it or not, AppleScript really does have a syntax, which as far as I know has only been fully documented once.)

Apple definitely has the in-house people to write an OS. The guy who wrote Mach works at Apple. The author of one of the slickest filesystems ever works there too. Oh yeah, and remember this guy? Seriously, Apple has been out-delivering Microsoft since 2001; you can't pick on them for not knowing how to write an OS.

(And, just to be snarky, Microsoft got their kernel folks from somewhere else too.)

I'm glad my OS was designed by, err, designers, incidentally. Apple has some computer science folk, but a computer scientist designing an OS is like a physicist designing a car.

I'm eagerly awaiting Longhorn, incidentally.

Just one more good reason to bite the bullet, sit down, and build yourself a MythTV box.

There's a good walkthrough on building a MythTV box over on O'Reilly Digital Media, and another on the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Right, because we all know ESR is on the same level with those two guys because he's responsible for uh... What exactly did he do?
if you want to walk around in OSS-land at least try to remember who the important people are! A good introduction might be to read a book about it...

You can send in an application for "...a method of wiping your arse comprising the step of utilizing paper in a back and forth rubbing motion" and that application would also be published.

The difference being that if you're Jeff Bezos, you have the money to resubmit it ten times. Eventually you'll get the one disgruntled guy who just wants to go home early and signs whatever is on his desk.

And don't tell me it never happens that way, because it does.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

And then there are the embarrassing dupes and story descriptions that are just blatantly wrong. In a world where everyone and their dog has one or more blogs, Slashdot is quickly becoming irrelevant.

As an aside, I think comment moderation should be done the same was as meta-moderation: You get 10 random comments to moderate on, instead of cherry-picking them.

You need to get rid of the "/" at the end or you get a 500, so use this link

Thanks for the link.

Perhaps a more useful link.

Once upon a time, somebody named Richard Stallman got pissed off because he needed to see the source code to a program so he could fix it, and the code author told him he was restricted by an NDA.
http://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch01.html
He was so miffed at this that he went off and founded GNU (Gnu's Not Unix), meant to be a free version of Unix.
http://www.gnu.org/
"dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistribution, understanding, and modification of computer programs." But there was (and still is) one problem with the GNU operating system...it didn't have the kernel (the part of the OS that talks to the hardware at the lowest level), which project was known as the HURD
http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd.html
which is STILL "not ready for production use, as there are still many bugs and missing features."

Enter Linus Torvalds, who, unaware of the GNU project, undertook to write his *own* kernel upon which he would then put an operating system that was to be, you guessed it, a free version of Unix. Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman got adjascent seats on an airplane with their luggage mixed up or something; however they met, they met, and with Torvalds' kernel and Stallman's operating system it was indeed the birth of the blues.

Fade out, fade in. Today, we have the Free (as in freedom *and* beer) Operating System that is part GNU, part Linux, and even part BSD (I stumble upon the occasional BSD program running on my Linux system ), and part everything else. In a commercial world, there'd be trademarks and copyrights and logos and every other byte of binary on your disk would be the stupid trademark/OS EULA/NDA warning of legal repercussions, etc. Windows users, get *any* hex editor, open *any* Windows program, you'll see "Microsoft" written in the ASCII somewhere: this is what I'm talking about. But this is Linux. Nobody really owns it all per se, because we basement hackers and renegade computer users and indignant MIT lab rats wrote it all ourselves, and don't really care about becoming millionaires or dominating the world about it, so long as we have our free system.

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.