[throwaway32]

>BSD is losing its ground against Linux (and Windows).

why is that important? why do the BSDs have to be gaining on Linux to be a viable, useful system. If your entire goal becomes "competing" with Linux, you miss the entire point many people chose a BSD to begin with, a stable, well thought out, usable system. The ZFS integration clusterfuck with freeBSD pretty clearly shows the results of trying to rush things so they are somehow better than linux.

Merging all the BSDs together to "fight" Linux is stupid and shortsighted, the OpenBSD philosophy is about more than security tweaked defaults for freebsd, its an entire process from conception of a new program, to implementation, to maintenance of the code. If you try to reduce it to a common codebase, it is just going to be freebsd + tweaks, which negates the entire reason people want to use OpenBSD to begin with.

[hello_moto]

You might be right. The problem with software I suppose: if it grows, there will be pain. If it doesn't, well, let's just hope it won't stall and die quietly.

I don't mean to compete or fight against Linux in that sense. I suppose I just want to see more things happening in BSD land (Amazon instances, VirtualBox, native Java) but if that happens, could potentially disturb the stability of *BSD itself.

And yes, I do know (a bit) the principal behind OpenBSD that may not work well with other BSDs. Different goals that lead to different software development process.