>Even if such a attempt to merge were made, it would be too soon to even
>give it a name, although "uniBSD" does come to mind.  But as a
>mentioned in my post, merging the BSD's can be a distant long term goal.
>In the short term, those in the core of the BSD's could perhaps start
>thinking about small, incremental steps, like unifying some of the
>device drivers, using a common directory structure and naming
>conventions, eliminating the "domestic" and incorporating strong crypto
>directly into the distribution.  (If there are any US based concerns,
>I would be more than happy to donate a NetBSD server on a T3 in Canada
>to the NetBSD core development team with full root access.)
>
>Even if the core goals of the different BSD's are different, the
>differences are not to the degree that at least some small amount of
>convergence can take place.  After all, there is a lot more in common
>between the BSD's then there is with Linux, which is something that

   The thing you are apparantly missing in all of this is that such a merger
of the groups is a merger of people, not of source code. While the code may
look similar, there are deep idiological differences between the groups that
cannot be reconciled. We simply have different and often incompatible reasons
and motiviations for doing this stuff and even if the source code were
*identical*, no merger of the core people would be possible without each of
the groups radically changing their views, goals, and direction. Since we
work on this stuff for "fun" rather than profit, you'll never see these ideals
compromised.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project