In article <3AE3D15E.14041.4FFA460F@localhost>,
Thomas Michael Wanka <Tom@Wanka.at> wrote:
>On 23 Apr 2001, at 8:34, Greg Lehey wrote:
>
>> If anybody could give me some idea, I'd
>> be grateful.
>
>Hi,
>
>what is a "user"? Is the secretary who uses a computer in the office 
>that runs a BSD a user? Is the visitor of a website that runs on a 
>*BSD server a user? Are people that are connected to the internet 
>through a *BSD firewall users? The number of computers running an 
>OS is a more specific defined number. 

I was thinking the very same thing.  Also, what about MacOSX users, do
they count as BSD users because MacOSX has a BSDish kernel?  Then
there are all the embedded applications.

That's the trouble with counting BSDs; they're in places the naive
observer would least expect, and in forms he or she might not even
recognize.  That's why I thought Apple's codeword "Darwin" was so
wonderfully appropriate; BSD is impossible to kill because it is so
evolutionarily robust, having adapted to every form of computing
environment available over the past 20+ years.  It's survived the
deaths of hardware platforms, political schisms, the fad of
infinite-monkey-on-keyboards style development, failure of
corporations, and a billion, trillion premature reports of its demise.  

I think the bottom line is that BSD has evolved so much beyond its
beginnings that it's folly to speak of BSD purely in terms of one body
of code versus another.  4.1BSD looks very different from NetBSD 1.5
or 2.8BSD, after all... and it borrows freely from other OSes (and
other OSes from it) so where is the hard & fast boundary line to be
drawn between what is BSD and what is not?  I think BSD is much, much
more a philosophy than (just) a body of code; it's a way of designing
software to stand the test of time; doing it "right" rather than doing
it "right now".  It's short, it's coding for keeps.  I think BSD will
thrive so long as there are people with this this kind of commitment.
The golden age of BSD wasn't back in the 1980s, it's all around us!

cheers,
--Mirian