California based iXsystems has announced on October 10 that it has aquired PC-BSD, the producer of the FreeBSD based OS with the same name. The main selling points of PC-BSD are the graphical installer and a point-and-click packet manager (called PBI), apart of the rock-solid FreeBSD foundations. And all this comes for free! So why did an enterprise-class hardware provider buy a graphically inclined BSD? For one, iXsystems also has high-end workstations in its portfolio and probably want to run a (ABI-)stable but up to date OS on them. On the other hand, there is a will to push the development of PC-BSD towards a more sophisticated Server and Laptop support in the announcement. Although I wonder how Servers and Laptops fall into the same category for hardware support. I’m very curious to see how the journey for PC-BSD continues. Hopefully, the focus on not BSD-savvy users (administrators?) doesn’t get lost. The original announcement from iXsystems.