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but in the open source software industry, where most people are volunteering, it makes sense to try to be more efficient and not have 100 Linux distributions an

but in the open source software industry, where most people are volunteering, it makes sense to try to be more efficient and not have 100 Linux distributions and 5 BSD flavors or at least, it makes sense to me but I guess contributors are free to spend their time however they please

yellowapple 8y ago
OpenBSD and NetBSD have different priorities; NetBSD wants to run on every device possible, while OpenBSD wants to be simple and secure. It'd be more efficient to fork off and let them focus on those priorities (and cross-pollinate where it actually makes sense to cross-pollinate) than to expect those often-conflicting priorities to always have to be balanced throughout the entirety of development. Same goes for Linux distros (albeit to a lesser extent, since "compatibility with software written for bigger distros" tends to be an implicit design goal for smaller distros), or for illumos distros (OpenIndiana is very different from SmartOS).