Roughly around the time when Netcraft confirmed *BSD is dying, the true rot did begin in all Modern Operating System (TM) projects. Improvements towards POSIX compliance led many to set in stone their under-specified ABIs. Backwards Compatibility became an altar, and no large or small thing could be changed unless it arrived as a holy Option. It became verboten to affect the Installed Base. These MSO's have become little more than rallying points for employees and fans of corporations using them as appliances, with change only permitted when it immediately improves the bottom line -- performance, application compatibility, or new subsystems for new devices. Changes to the mid-layer rarely satisfy short-term cost-benefit analysis, as a result modifications of "base userland" become a forgotten art, a forbidden playground. The slow rate of change brings some grave risks for the future. Saddest of all, the midlayer is where most of the development community entered the picture to begin with.