> Gentoo developer Michał Górny first suggested [dropping support for LibreSSL] at the end of December, saying that LibreSSL offers no benefit over OpenSSL at this point while imposing a lot of costs. In particular, he complained about the large number of packages that require patches to work with LibreSSL and the constant stream of regressions that the project must deal with.

That about sums it up. The LibreSSL developers decided not to maintain even source compatibility, let alone binary compatibility. If application authors don't want the maintenance burden of supporting extra code paths for both, and distribution maintainers aren't happy keeping patchsets up to date, then that's about it.

And it sounds like OpenSSL is in much much better shape (both the code and the community around it) than when LibreSSL forked. This is a good thing! It means all the concern raised after Heartbleed actually functioned as intended, and turned OpenSSL into a healthy project.

I think it's also a good thing that LibreSSL continues to exist and that it is used in some of the BSDs. Having competing, well-maintained implementations is great, even if they're not drop-in replacements for each other. If OpenSSL falls into disrepair again, it means that an alternative is already available, even if there are switching costs.