Right now I feel like linux is slowly eating all the market share, if it continues that way the BSDs will regress back to the lines of Hurd and Plan9.
Competition is always a good thing, even in the OSS world.
Linux is just a kernel. The problem is that outside the kernel there is perhaps already too much competition. E.g. there is glibc, eglibc, bionic, dietlibc, etc. There is SysV init, systemd, Upstart, OpenRC, etc. Then we have GNOME, KDE, Unity, Xfce, Cinnamon, and MATE.
For practically any component in a Linux system, except the kernel itself, there is already a lot of competition. The BSDs add four more, albeit incompatible (with Linux and each other), user lands.
I think the FLOSS world would profit from less fragmentation and more focus on making the good projects better. Of course, polishing existing work is not as much fun as writing your own ;).
Don't get me wrong, I love FreeBSD and use it for somethings, but they don't really take security very seriously. Theo just gave this lecture with examples http://tech.yandex.com/events/ruBSD/2013/talks/103/
The thing is they had their schisms for a reason, and inability to work together is kind of baked in, even if much of the code does in practice cross pollinate further downstream.
The other question is if it's possible to get the benefits of the strange old hardware support without the old school power consumption. I think many relative youngsters would be surprised by how thirsty some of those classic UNIX boxes were, and the hardware must be close to dead now. At some point the only remaining working SPARCstation will be used to build OpenBSD.
That makes very little sense.
If I believed all the BSD forks had a chance to live long and prosper on their own I wouldn't be saying that, but right now it seems to me that none of them have any real long time chance to remain generic OS on par with Linux (except possibly FreeBSD but it's not even certain anymore). Linux just moves too fast these days.
> Competition is a good thing, so we should unite bit-parts that are in danger of being stomped out to ensure the dominant player still has competition in the future.
No, it would be getting rid of openbsd to try to prevent losing bsd.
I doubt you were truly unable to determine I was not talking about the Berkeley Software Distribution, but the family it spawned. Which leads me to conclude you are being obtuse. For... pleasure? I don't know.