I have to admit that I'm occasionally tempted by thoughts of running with Apache, simply because AOLserver has been a hard sell for us at times. But I usually change my mind when I start thinking of how much work it wouuld be, and that it's likely that even with all that hard work the performance still wouldn't be as good as what we have now.
The OpenNSD project was started about a year and a half ago to try to address some of these issues; unfortunately it ran out of steam. It was born out of frustration with the folks at AOL, who were very rude and condescending to community members who dared to contribute patches or even point out bugs. But the very act of creating OpenNSD was apparently the kick in the pants they needed, and attitudes improved which took away some of the urgency behind the project. Then we started thinking we should wait for 4.x to come out... who knew it was going to take this long???
It might be worth considering reviving that project, if only because the name OpenNSD a) doesn't mention AOL and b) makes it clear that it's an Open Source project, not one dependent on the whims of a large corporation.
