Mark Shuttleworth, the wallet behind Ubuntu, described on his blog a desire to see major Linux distributions on a common release schedule, so that major releases of associated software can match up. (via) This would be useful for the BSD world, too, though it doesn’t affect BSD releases as dramatically – Linux distributions are more important for what third-party software they handle than anything else, so their release timing is even more critical.

The various BSDs seem to be moving towards a 6-month release schedule, in any case – that’s
the stated goal for OpenBSD and DragonFly, and hopefully someone knows (please comment if you’re that someone) if there’s a known goal for NetBSD or FreeBSD.