It proves/disproves/doesn'treallydoeither some pedantic point about what is or isn't an "operating system."

Not to mention Plan 9 features like /proc or UTF-8 encoding that made it out to other operating systems. As for the HURD, I don't think anyone's found any good ideas to rip off.

Agree on your seven points above. Sadly, I've got one that pretty much vetoes all of them and puts me in the Linux camp: the turnaround time for hardware SUCKS. When I last used FreeBSD around 6.1 or 6.2ish, I was having to import out-of-tree drivers for a stock Intel onboard chip (on a two-year old motherboard). The last time I tried to install it on a laptop, it pretty much gave up at the boot screen, and I shudder to think of whether or not it would even get that far on my Qosmio. It's kind of a shame, cause I really miss the system.

IIRC, there's actually case law regarding used sales/rentals of console games as opposed to PC software. (I don't remember the details off the top of my head though).

The right to a jury trial in a civil suit is MUCH more limited than it is in a criminal case. In particular, civil juries decide only matters of fact, not matters of law (they're supposed to in criminal cases as well, but a criminal jury has an absolute right to acquit for any reason).

They didn't make an antivirus. They bought a company that made an antivirus, rebranded and released it.

"Do one thing and do it well" really wouldn't have flown in the days of hand-written CONFIG.SYS files.

Certain companies (Apple) have no-GPLv3 policies in place.

Things like device drivers can be easily diked out. When it comes to stuff like memory managers, VFS, CPU schedulers, basic networking, so on and so forth, I imagine that the bloat hurts the embedded guys more.

The downsides were too glaringly obvious, though. Most distros near the end of 2.4.x's useful life were either a.) supporting 2 or 3-year old hardware at best, or b.) backporting balky changes from the dev tree. Come to think of it, kind of like RHEL.

Actually, FreeBSD 6 is set to EOL (ie, security fixes stop) next year, and FreeBSD 7 will EOL 2 years after the last release. I hear ya on the rest of it though; if hardware turnaround times were better, I might be running FreeBSD 7 right now instead of Ubuntu.

Mostly ancient history. Free and NetBSD split off from the original Jolix project (NetBSD split off early; the FreeBSD guys tried to work within the system until it was unfeasible), OpenBSD started up when Theo de Raadt got kicked from NetBSD, and DragonFly happened with the whole FreeBSD 5.x Royal Mongolian Goatfuck. They never had one benevolent dictator like Torvalds or RMS, so personality conflicts had the potential to split systems.

It was mentioned outright on one of the news channels yesterday that a stock buyback was coming.

That's what I meant. If a computer is controlling the reactor, one can't take the computer to Captain's Mast when it screws up.