They absolutely could, yes. That is not what I'm arguing at all, so I am perfectly happy to agree. IMHO what drove a lot of the development of FOSS xNix, espec

They absolutely could, yes. That is not what I'm arguing at all, so I am perfectly happy to agree. IMHO what drove a lot of the development of FOSS xNix, especially Linux -- which has thereby created a lot of the tools and apps and things that make the BSDs useful today -- was the desire to have a proper memory-managed protect-mode OS for personal desktop use. That's why Xfce, GNOME, KDE, X.org and XFree86 before it, and a tonne of other FOSS projects exist. The fact that occasionally some of this is also useful on servers is, I reckon, because so many people wanted their own personal UNIX workstation, using COTS kit.