I have bad news.
A month ago techlead of Rambler's Mail department declared in his blog
that they begin
migration from FreeBSD to Debian/Ubuntu. Comments to the
blog entry (there was much flame) revealed that search department of
Russian search engine #1 Yandex.com also plans to migrate their
search cluster - about 30,000 servers in several DCs (~60% of total
their servers - to Linux. The problem here is that both big companies
were using FreeBSD from the beginning (~1997), so migration will be
rather expensive.
The official reasons (really semi-official, as these are individual
blogs), in short, were:
* inadequate package manager and huge monolithic base system
*
lack of OpenVZ-like virtualization (need CPU limiting)
* a FreeBSD marketshare forecast for 5 years
Despite of several our committers working for them, the operating
expenses for FreeBSD are considered too high by these companies. They've
not confirmed, but the key problem is probably shortage of FreeBSD
specialists on the market to hire (e.g. Yandex has about 20 FreeBSD
admins and about 84 Linux admins, for all other their services and
40% of servers).
So this is problem of FreeBSD's too low
userbase/marketshare, caused, in turn, by other FreeBSD's problems.
Given that they is just planning today, but not yet started, we have to
solve our problems or FreeBSD will effectively die[1]. Currently
https://ssl.netcraft.com/ssl-sample-report//CMatch/oscnt_all shows that
still 3% of servers are running FreeBSD. We are currently probably at
the tip of 'hype curve'[2] and then our userbase will begin to shrink,
and the task is to solve problems, so after hard time it will rise again
(hopefully more than it was before).
[1] 'Die' means shrinking userbase size to those of NetBSD/OpenBSD.
[2]
http://www.metodolog.ru/01493/2.gif