Only speaking for myself, but I initally switched to OSX right from FreeBSD because of the similarity . At that point the PHP+MySQL stack was still faster on BS

Only speaking for myself, but I initally switched to OSX right from FreeBSD because of the similarity . At that point the PHP+MySQL stack was still faster on BSD (mainly because of yahoo I think) and the ports system much easier to use than rpms for instance. Otherwise I only saw Solaris or commercial types of unix (like what came with IBM servers) in use in companies I directly worked with. I understand that linux was already rising pretty strong, but tried and true Unix/BSD systems were definitely seen as the more 'serious'/professional choices.