[niroze]

Great opinion piece. I think this is mostly the opinion of anyone that really discovers OpenBSD and gets caught up in it. Security does matter, and the developers accept nothing less than what they want.

My main problem with OpenBSD development is that all development is decided solely by the developers and there doesn't seem to be much care for what others want.. which is fine, they're doing all the work for peanuts.

Sometimes you just have to do things that aren't well suited for OpenBSD (imagine updating and ensuring hundreds of OpenBSD machines are up-to-date, and running high performant threaded applications). Many things work, but that is all they do. Sure it may be much more secure than other unix or linux offerings, it may be all there is. Much of the ports are just "get this to compile and work". That isn't always good enough. Truly evaluate if it fits your needs. If there is something you want on the platform, it may be up to you to fix it.

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Unrelated, I find it interesting that NetBSD isn't mentioned once in this entire thread.

[4ad]

I've seen this type of comments many times, in many different context, about many different open source software projects, and I never understood them.

> all (OpenBSD) development is decided solely by the developers and there doesn't seem to be much care for what others want

This implies this is not the case for every other project.

To pick on your SMP performance example, Linux doesn't have better SMP because "developer saw that people want SMP, and decided to implement it". Linux has better SMP because some people came and implemented it. Not at other's people request, that is never relevant.

Different open source projects attract different (developer) audiences, and different project have different audience sizes, but don't make the fallacy that some projects chose what to work on (architecturally speaking) because user demanded it. That is never the case. Everything big happens because developers want it.

[niroze]

It isn't a "fight" or a "Linux vs OpenBSD" thing. It is just how they approach development. One could argue if it is "good" or "bad", but what matters is knowing it exists.

Many projects have different approaches to development. Sure, many people work on bugs most of the time, but there are big decisions about where the limited resources are going to be spent on new features. Those are the ones that truly matter.

There are examples of amazing things people have just done on a whim, but that isn't truly a standard and much of those things are generally huge.

[thegeekpirate]

There are plenty of projects on Github which implement features based on requests (submitted via the issue tracker).