Actually I would hope that BSD in particular would take off a bit more for that reason. Something like NetBSD is as portable as portable can be. You have the very pleasant BSD liscense also. Just add some decent drivers and its a great starter for an OS. I wonder if anyone has bother to try to market this -- a Super Private and Secure Web Surfing OS that Virus Scans and Firewalls the PC. IIRC, the full Norton Suite is ~USD$99 or so, just sell that that way. You got the FLOSS firewall, browsers, email, IM, iPod syncing, Fluendo about to release all of the multimedia codecs shortly, and a company that does know AV well (porting it would be best). Why couldnt that be rolled into a product for about that price, 99 that is, plus a wee bit more for the Symantec name and some basic support?

I actually expected MS to this route, simply to screw the NIX vendors at their own game. Create a WM that is WinNT compliant and sell that ontop of FreeBSD. Closed source or not, that would make alot of people alot happier, and loosen the noose around their necks -
-better, infinitely better, security
-cheaper to make and maintain
-less staffing needeed, allows focus on more areas at once and make them work well
-gain respect once more by doing the smart thing

Anyhooo....

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