Thorsten Glaser wrote: > Nick Guenther dixit: >> Um. Wow. I think Theo wins. > > OpenBSD has had MicroBSD forked off twice, MirOS and ekkoBSD too.
Ok I'll bite, since I can speak quite well (not definitively however) for ekkoBSD. I can't speak for the exact reason the fork happened (since I didn't start it), but I can speak for a couple of us who got involved very early and ended up playing major roles (relatively speaking, this was a small project where not much progress was ever made) almost entirely by accident. ekkoBSD was not forked (in my understanding) because of any perceived stagnation in OpenBSD, nor any lack of leadership, nor long term viability. It was forked because there were very clear goals for OpenBSD and we thought the code-base could be taken in another direction. OpenBSD was used because we had (and have) a tremendous respect for OpenBSD, Theo, and the entire core of active developers. I suspect a lack of respect for Theo may have played a role in the founder's motives, but not for those of us who got involved and kept it going as long as it did. What we discovered during that time was in line with Nick's analysis, Theo has the right project organization for OpenBSD. We had a core group which largely consisted of people interesting in tinkering but without a strong drive for the project itself. I (and I suspect the others I purport to speak for) would have stuck around as long as the project was being driven forward along its goals, but achieving those goals always seemed like someone else's problem. As for NetBSD, for as long as I've been interested (a little more than 5 years now, not back to the old-days of NetBSD) it's always seemed to be the kind of system driven by tinkering. I would expect that to lead to the of lack of progress Charles talks about, but I don't see a reason to be that alarmist for a system that I've always considered to be moving along in exactly the way being described. -- Stephen Paskaluk
