While OpenBSD is widely known to tech people, it's not on frontpages like Linux has been, and it has zero backing by marketing and sales departments like what c

While OpenBSD is widely known to tech people, it's not on frontpages like Linux has been, and it has zero backing by marketing and sales departments like what corporations have e.g. RedHat or Oracle. IBM has traditionally been good at enterprise customers, and tech, and I guess the need of an explanation reflects that this is a big cultural space. Credit is due in the fact that they take time to ask the question. My personal take is that if IBM's committment is to broaden an ecosystem (as I think I see hints of with the OpenPOWER initiative), then donating is a fairly obvious choice as it's a fantastic value deal - one more major OS supported. However in a traditional enterprise framing for very large customers only, maybe OpenBSD support wouldn't make sales happen. This is still an extremely recent conversation and I am sure a range of decisionmakers are involved indirectly. Let's see how it turns out. I do agree that real hardware in developers' hands is required for real architecture support. Let's see what kind of physical footprint and price point the Talos OpenPOWER motherboard will have in 1-2 years from now.