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Andrew Tanenbaum On Minix, Linux, BSD, and Licensing
An anonymous reader points out an interesting, detailed interview with Andrew Tanenbaum at Linuxfr.org; Tanenbaum holds forth on the current state of MINIX, licensing decisions, and the real reason he believes that Linux caught on just when he "thought BSD was going to take over the world." ("I think Linux succeeded against BSD, which was a stable mature system at the time simply because BSDI got stuck in a lawsuit and was effectively stopped for several years.")
I'm glad that Linux exists, but apart from commercial apps and manufacturer support it's really hard to find anything that Linux does better than *BSD does. At least not for home use. In fact I've had far more problems with Linux over the years due to the absolutely insane model they're using. *BSD, OSX, BeOS, Windows etc., etc., are all OSes that have all the components necessary in one install, Linux is goofy like that. Linux has no basesystem it's just a kernel and as a result you get all sorts of head aches as you can't just update the base without touching the entire userland, rather than just the software you installed.
Also, I've found that in the past the driver support was questionable. The quality has gone up greatly since I installed my first copy, but *BSD never had that kind of problem. Sure there would be fewer devices supported, but you knew that if it was supported it would work. And typically work properly, I don't recall ever having gotten a nasty surprise from FreeBSD when a device half worked.
I call bullshit on your bullshit.
You're going to great lengths to dig up reasons for BSD operating systems to be bad. Of course the pace of development is slower with *BSD they're actually developing entire OSes rather than just using the work of hundreds of independent projects to cobble together an OS. That takes time, but it's also why you can install the base OS and not have to worry about breaking your install by updating your software. The software is by and large separate from the core OS, protecting it from the common interference you see in Linux.
As for also rans, you act like that isn't a problem for Linux, OSX, Android and Windows as well.
As for metitocratic, you ought to provide some sort of evidence to support your claim. Unlike Linux, there's a much larger group of people that are authorized to make those decisions and by and large they do so well. There are occasionally regressions, but because the OS is both stable and mature, I can't recall the last time I ran into one that I actually noticed.
Why would I write a network card for FreeBSD? The vast majority of manufacturers of such cards write their own drivers. Chances are that if there isn't a driver that it's a crap card and certainly not by a manufacturer that takes networking seriously. In practice I don't recall ever having had a computer for which the network card wasn't supported out of the box.