I&#x27;ve seen this type of comments many times, in many different context, about many different open source software projects, and I never understood them.<p>&gt; all (OpenBSD) development is decided solely by the developers and there doesn&#x27;t seem to be much care for what others want<p>This implies this is not the case for every other project.<p>To pick on your SMP performance example, Linux doesn&#x27;t have better SMP because &quot;developer saw that people want SMP, and decided to implement it&quot;. Linux has better SMP because some people came and implemented it. Not at other&#x27;s people request, that is never relevant.<p>Different open source projects attract different (developer) audiences, and different project have different audience sizes, but don&#x27;t make the fallacy that some projects chose what to work on (architecturally speaking) because user demanded it. That is <i>never</i> the case. Everything big happens because <i>developers</i> want it.