Hope FBSD makes a comeback in mainstream computing. Used FreeBSD 4 for a mail server with sendmail until early 2000s with vinum RAID and afs distributed FS. Such an orderly, unconfused O/S.
So whilst Linux for many put BSD's to distant past memories, the amount of code from it that is used in other projects/products down the line is larger than many realise and can imagine that more people run lines of code with FreeBSD origins today than early 2000's.
WRT to the C10K problem mentioned below... We find FreeBSD scales quite well to at least several hundred thousand connections. Our largest experimental machines can serve nearly 400Gb/s of real customer traffic across hundreds of thousands of TCP conns from a single-socket AMD Rome. This is all with a "traditional" kernel-based workflow, serving media files with sendfile, and doing encryption of HTTPS traffic via kTLS (with NIC-based hardware TLS offload in this case). There is no DPDK or other userspace networking or storage.
https://tekdeeps.com/ps5-will-have-an-825gb-ssd-but-only-700...
They even asked Dev's from FreeBSD ;)
[1] https://www.freebsdnews.com/2017/03/08/nintendo-switch-runs-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/emulation/comments/hygtnx/mesospher...
As such, Linux will never fully substitute for the use-cases that BSD provides.
More or less - BSD focuses on developer freedoms while GPL focuses on end-user freedoms. GPL does not provide you the ability to redistribute binaries without source, while BSD does, so BSD is desirable where obscurity is an element of depth in defense (eg Sony's playstation OSs, Intel ME, etc), or where you simply don't want to redistribute your derivative code (MacOS X, etc). GPL also does not allow you to link GPL-incompatible code (either proprietary or non-compatible open-source licenses) that you don't own and can't relicense to GPL compatible, as that inherently locks off a significant amount of code that you might potentially need (what if you are licensing an audio decoder from a well-known German standards institute?). It simply is much easier for developers to work with with BSD license, as it does not attempt to be "viral" like copyleft code. Here is the code, don't sue the authors, end of story.
Frankly it's somewhat impressive that GPL has done as well as it has, the necessity to only link with GPL-compatible code has become a pain point but the kernel project has enough clout to get people to license patches however the project wants (see: ZFS and the kernel devs trolling by relicensing files out from under them). GPL is actually an enormous pain from a licensing and corporate IP perspective and BSD avoids that.
Written as a satisfied NetBSD user.
macOS is a BSD, just buried under layers of proprietary UI, tracking, and DRM
Compiled it myself, compiled PHP/MySQL/Apache, tweaked it and it always worked.