“It is important to understand that operating systems kernels
are a side show of open source movement. Scripting languages and
applications (especially scripting languages) are the key
components of the movement. So it’s Apache, bind, postfix, Perl,
PHP, Python, Postgress and MySQL that are flagships of the
movement. Linux kernel is just a side show, a new BIOS on which
open applications run and from the technical standpoint it has all
the attractiveness of the BIOS (which is another way to say that
it’s pretty boring). Moreover Linux is just one of many interesting
open source kernels, which (for unrelated to its technical merits
reasons) gets all PR ink. FreeBSD and other BSD kernels are equally
important, less bloated and more technically interesting (FreeBSD
pioneered jails–a light weight virtual machine in 1999; OpenBSD
defines the state of the art of secure X86-based Unix; NetBSD
defines the standard in Unix portability). This article suggests
that opening of Solaris as well as Sun efforts to put Solaris 10 on
Opteron on equal footing with Solaris for UltraSparc further moved
the pendulum from the Linux kernel on the technical side of the OSS
arena…”