Tell me about it RHEL is a pain in the butt. I much prefer Suse (SLE) from a usability standpoint. I think the reason BSD isn't more popular though for example with Oracle is because there is no company that sells BSD as a business platform and is as well known as RH. Sure it's a major part of OSX but not many people use OSX as a server.
There did used to be a company called BSDI that sold BSD/386, I wonder whatever happened to them. Way back in the day, Oracle had a project called Raw Iron in which they planned to sell boxes as dedicated Oracle appliances, they used FreeBSD for that, so somewhere within the company they do acknowledge that it's the best of the free Unixes (for their app).
My cow-orkers and I all run OSX, FreeBSD, Debian/Ubuntu on our own kit... No-one I know uses Red Hat by choice. I'd love to deploy XServes at work, but again, it's a mindshare problem... Dells running Red Hat, yuck.
BSDi merged with Walnut Creek, then sold its software operations off to Wind River in 2001. That was a bit of a rocky period for FreeBSD releases, if memory serves, since a good chunk of core had worked for Walnut Creek before the merger...
