I'm amazed projects like that are still active.

This isn't a case where systemd is ahead of the curve, every other OS also starts services in parallel.

Plenty don’t, e.g. BSDs. Bunch of embedded GNU/Linux systems. Etc.

I meant OSs that have consumer market share. Eg on people's desktops and phones. Nobody cares about BSDs and a bunch of embedded GNU/Linux systems

A lot of people care about BSDs and embedded Linux systems. Such as: Netflix (FreeBSD), anyone with a Linux-based router or cable/DSL modem, and so on.

That said, parallel startup is possible on those systems too. There was an out-of-tree patch for parallel rc(8) on FreeBSD some time ago, and dinit is parallel, etc. I think OpenRC should move towards making parallel startup stable and supported so that those systems can do that as well.

Almost everyone's router is an embedded Busybox/Musl/Linux system. There are billions of them running every day.

they don't use openrc though

Alpine has market share. It's just targeting a different market space than what you're measuring.

> consumer market share

Some Alpine linux derivatives are kinda want switch to systemd and hence the porting

OpenRC doesn’t have huge consumer market share, at least in the context where this sort of thing matters. For regular Linux desktops, most of the distros use SystemD.

It is a simple little startup system with some dedicated users. Open source projects don’t need huge user-counts to justify their existence. It isn’t a profit center, people just do this stuff for fun, because they enjoy tinkering, or maybe they coded it up and decided to just share it out of altruism.