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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 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.