K, I did dig through the libevent version which Open MPI bundles. It is indeed based on libevent, but it is patched (some files got added, some modified, the diff between both is ~5k lines) so much, that Open MPI won't compile with the stock libevent package. I don't see an easy way of getting Open MPI to work with the original package. Any ideas?

Also, how is statical linking a security risk?