Open BSD is popular in Calgary because Theo lives here and promotes (and supports) it actively. There is a very large developer community built up around Open BSD because of his presence.
Having said that, every organization I've ever spoken in any depth understands that there is huge value for a supported platform. SLES and RHEL both provide that. Ubuntu probably will a few years down the road, but the BSDs are a very long ways from that happening.
Theo basically killed that possibility for OpenBSD when he started yapping about the US military a few years back. And frankly, that's a perfect example of why BSD isn't a good choice. Theo's personal convictions (and it doesn't matter if I agree with them or not) had a direct impact on every OpenBSD customer in the world.
Although I think it's cool that Theo speaks his mind, would you want to put your company at risk by using a product spearheaded by such a hothead? Obviously, the US military didn't think it was a wise plan, and backed out. If they hadn't, and Theo had, for example, quit supporting OpenBSD because he felt that he would be implicitly condoning military action, where would an organization running OpenBSD be left? Obviously, this is FUD, but at the same time, it's largely based in the real world.
We're a pretty progressive organization. I financially and developmentally support two distributions as well as several OSS projects. I retained a KDE developer on staff for more than a year. But I would not undertake maintaining a distro myself. Nor would I bet that any of the BSDs could find enough developers amongst themselves to maintain one.
I understand that the other BSDs are somewhat different. But I wouldn't bet my company on one. I went that route with Gentoo, and it went OK, we had 1 problem on 1 server during 3 years of running 15 Gentoo servers in 5 offices, but our experiences resolving that issue led me to now build on SLES.
Kev.