[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).