I've been tinkering with open-source software for slightly over a decade now. Here's a little history and one slightly silly demonstration of FreeBSD's versatility.
A more recent project has been observation of the new release 6.0's crashes .
A significant change in 6.0 and later version of FreeBSD has been new defaults for the serial ports. I'm unclear on the motivation for the change, but the practical effect was to render lprps, a set of programs to utilize serial PostScript printers, completely useless. The printer would silently time out, with lpd simply reporting "lp is not responding".
After much investigation, guided by Per Hedeland on comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc, it turned out that the stty flag icanon was set by default. Setting the flag in /etc/printcap is a bit subtle, a syntax error in my version caused the flag to be silently skipped. Here are a set of /etc/printcap samples which work under 6-STABLE and 7-CURRENT. They might be of some help to other users of serial port printers, and perhaps others.
Most of my use for FreeBSD has been communication, initially via PPP. Probably not many folks do that anymore. For what it's worth: There are many resources for configuring PPP clients, but not so many for simple servers. Having (not-so) recently retired a working and very stable ppp link perhaps it's useful to post client and server ppp.conf files as reference.
Readers should note that the client is invoked with "ppp -ddial pmdemand" but logs into the server with name "nemesis", which requires
nemesis:$1$gd.GZcGA$gNvkX3tD0CNHh2lpzqiYJ0:1002:1002::0:0:User &:/usr/home/nemesis:/etc/ppp/ppp-shell
in the server's /etc/master.passwd file.