First of all, thanks to Vadim for his initial post: it's evident he spend a lot of time preparing it.

I just want to give my 0.02$ to this discussion:

FreeBSD 9.0 is a huge step in the right direction in many ways. Perhaps what I like most is getting done with the last GNU toolchain and ZFS updates and maintaining the well known stability and performance along with the new features.

Unfortunately some necessary updates didn't make it in time, in particular pkgng and the X.Org drivers. The new installer is promising but lately installing and configuring XOrg has become a nightmare so I find myself suggesting people to use PC-BSD instead.

Some rather important changes that seem critical for the future like ARM-EABI and a new toolchain seem to be lacking developers and perhaps are going on too slowly to expect them to work in the near future but, all in all, I should mention that FreeBSD is still very influential and competitive. I've seen posts not too long ago where linux developers praise FreeBSD for keeping the development pace despite having a much smaller group.

What I think is that perhaps FreeBSD shouldn´t be expecting to be a better linux than linux, simply because there is no company related to any BSD in capacity to compete with, say, Redhat. We still can do pretty much everything linux does with a little extras, but we are a actually niche market and it actually hasn't worked bad at all for us.

Concerning BSD sites moving to linux to reduce costs, as a long time Yahoo user I have to say that doesn't seem to be going very well for them. I am pretty sure such a process is painful for them as it is for the end user.

IMHO, we need to focus on the two fields where people expect FreeBSD to shine:

- Servers: performance has always been our strong point   but perhaps we should be focusing on ease of use. Ohh...   BTW, jails are awesome!

- Embedded devices: FreeBSD's license is key here.

I don't think the FreeBSD Foundation has been clueless at all though, coordinating efforts in a voluntary project like this *is* tough. Some people complain because we release too fast but some also complain because the release cycle is too long. We can't satisfy everyone and development just goes on.

Pedro.