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