@bob @thegibson @qbfreak I feel much the same way but can't really see GNU/Linux as becoming non-viable - if only because Linux is more of an OS toolkit (a kernel and a bunch of mix-and-match userland support programs) rather than a complete OS in and of itself (such as the BSDs), so you could always roll your own. Support becomes a major headache, though, as you have to monitor security vulns in all of the components and update them yourself. Then again, for embedded systems with only a small set of programs (in extremis, the Linux kernel, busybox and your embedded app running out of an initrd ramdisk) it might not be too bad. Commercial Linux (at least RHEL) is becoming unviable on the server though, so I'm leaning towards BSD there. Ubuntu I rejected since the Amazon thing.