6 ms·

An idea from the 'Crossing the Chasm' book is to find a niche where whatever characteristics of the product you're working on can win. You are not going to win

by davidw 3y ago

An idea from the 'Crossing the Chasm' book is to find a niche where whatever characteristics of the product you're working on can win. You are not going to win going head to head with the entrenched competitors. What does that look like for Hurd?

harry8 3y ago
>You are not going to win going head to head with the entrenched competitors. Linux, (not big and professional like gnu), is not going to win but could find a niche somewhere. Hm, ok.
- davidw 3y ago
  Yep, it found a "niche": people could actually hack on it and get it to do stuff, rather than waiting around for the other thing, which wasn't even really a thing yet anyway. Linux has a large, large established user base at this point. If you want to attract people to a different platform, you need a compelling reason. For people just looking to look/experiment/learn/play, 'something new' that's more easily understood because it's small might be enough, but that's unlikely to be a large user base.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Going off base, as this is about Hurd vs GNU/Linux. On the IoT space it seems like not everyone is keen in having to deal with GPL and Linux, hence the myriad of FOSS MIT/Apache licensed OSSes that now exist. Zephyr, NuttX, Mbed, Amazon RTOS, Redox, Tock... And then there still the commercial alternatives.
    - Gibbon1 3y ago
      Linux is amazing what you can do with it. You can implement things in a day that you simply couldn't afford otherwise. And it's probably a 100-1000 times less reliable than systems architected around actual RTOS's.
    - spookie 3y ago
      To be completely honest, there are people against the GPL just about everywhere. For the same reasons, there are also people just about anywhere that do find value in the GPL. The license is there for a reason, and its working. As for "competitors", that's pretty cool :)
  - harry8 3y ago
    I think you missed the point of that comment completely. Which market segment does linux not totally dominate nowadays? Phones, big servers, embedded devices, HPC... Maybe you could argue desktops? Maybe? Still a very signficant player there however you dice it. Going back to Linus' original email announcement then apply your framework and you don't predict linux competing anywhere let alone dominating everywhere. How could anyone? Smash Sun, IBM, HP all of them. No chance. None. The future, it's really hard to predict except in hindsight.
    - qubex 3y ago
      The fact that Linux dominates does not entail that other architectural approaches may be more suitable for the task. Variety is the spice of life and the “Linux monoculture” might not be such a great thing. BeOS/Haiku, Plan9/Inferno, OS400, and Fuchisa are all fascinating lineages that excel in their chosen domains.
adastra22 3y ago
I don’t know enough about Hurd to say, but as an example MINUX found its niche as the control software for Intel’s management system. As a result MINUX is/was more widely deployed than Linux for a few years. Still might be.
- microtonal 3y ago
  Just for clarification, you mean MINIX. Fun fact, even Andrew Tanenbaum only learned about this through news coverage: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/ https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
  - adastra22 3y ago
    Thanks, was posting from mobile and memory.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I don't know why this comment got downvoted? Purely on spelling?
- kjs3 3y ago
  I would argue that MINIX being used by one company for one application that isn't visible to users and doesn't (as far as I know) contribute any code back to the wider MINIX community (which is a thing) means it really isn't in the same conversation with Linux and *BSD. YMMV.
TheDong 3y ago
That's the wrong framing for Hurd. Hurd isn't a "product" that's trying to "win" by beating competitors. It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. You might as well ask "How can my local pick-up basketball team find a niche to make money, like NBA players do? Can we all wear more colorful jerseys so TV stations cover us?" No, that's silly, the point of the pick-up basketball team isn't to make money, it isn't to beat a competitor, like the NBA, for sports coverage, it's to hang out with friends and have fun. That's what many free software projects are like. And if enough people come to hang out and have fun, it might organically become bigger and better, but if you start making it the point of it, it ruins it. If you tell the pick-up basketball people "No, you can't join, you're not photogenic enough", you won't have friends soon. If you start telling hurd developers "We need to take on MS, stop working on that thing you care about, no one else cares about it", the project will die.
- LambdaComplex 3y ago
  > It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. Okay, then tell us why we should care about it when more popular operating systems fit our needs better anyways.
  - predictabl3 3y ago
    They really should just rename the site CapitalistNews or AntiHackerNews or MiddleManagementNews or PMTechNews. Man, y'all are gonna be so mad when you find out some people work on OSS projects for fun or ideological reasons. Again, a sentiment that needs repeating far too often here, not everything is about, or for, you.
    - justsid 3y ago
      I wrote a little kernel for fun in high school. I wish I still had the time to pick it back up again, or contribute to something like GNU/Hurd. Stuff like this is exactly the reason I became fascinated with programming. Not everyone here is a joyless sack of shit yet.
    - 3y ago
dale_glass 3y ago
Could be impossible? I mean, any unique features HURD has, Linux can easily copy, like with FUSE. The safety benefits are kind of dubious, in that we're not in the 90s anymore, restarting Windows 3 times a day. Modern kernels are very stable as it is, so more stability is barely noticeable. And we have containers and virtualization.
prettyStandard 3y ago
cmrdporcupine has a good answer for this below. Target RISC-V. Does it match the ideology? From my limited understanding, I think so.

by davidw 3y ago

harry8 3y ago

>You are not going to win going head to head with the entrenched competitors. Linux, (not big and professional like gnu), is not going to win but could find a niche somewhere. Hm, ok.

davidw 3y ago
Yep, it found a "niche": people could actually hack on it and get it to do stuff, rather than waiting around for the other thing, which wasn't even really a thing yet anyway. Linux has a large, large established user base at this point. If you want to attract people to a different platform, you need a compelling reason. For people just looking to look/experiment/learn/play, 'something new' that's more easily understood because it's small might be enough, but that's unlikely to be a large user base.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Going off base, as this is about Hurd vs GNU/Linux. On the IoT space it seems like not everyone is keen in having to deal with GPL and Linux, hence the myriad of FOSS MIT/Apache licensed OSSes that now exist. Zephyr, NuttX, Mbed, Amazon RTOS, Redox, Tock... And then there still the commercial alternatives.
  - Gibbon1 3y ago
    Linux is amazing what you can do with it. You can implement things in a day that you simply couldn't afford otherwise. And it's probably a 100-1000 times less reliable than systems architected around actual RTOS's.
  - spookie 3y ago
    To be completely honest, there are people against the GPL just about everywhere. For the same reasons, there are also people just about anywhere that do find value in the GPL. The license is there for a reason, and its working. As for "competitors", that's pretty cool :)
- harry8 3y ago
  I think you missed the point of that comment completely. Which market segment does linux not totally dominate nowadays? Phones, big servers, embedded devices, HPC... Maybe you could argue desktops? Maybe? Still a very signficant player there however you dice it. Going back to Linus' original email announcement then apply your framework and you don't predict linux competing anywhere let alone dominating everywhere. How could anyone? Smash Sun, IBM, HP all of them. No chance. None. The future, it's really hard to predict except in hindsight.
  - qubex 3y ago
    The fact that Linux dominates does not entail that other architectural approaches may be more suitable for the task. Variety is the spice of life and the “Linux monoculture” might not be such a great thing. BeOS/Haiku, Plan9/Inferno, OS400, and Fuchisa are all fascinating lineages that excel in their chosen domains.

adastra22 3y ago

I don’t know enough about Hurd to say, but as an example MINUX found its niche as the control software for Intel’s management system. As a result MINUX is/was more widely deployed than Linux for a few years. Still might be.

microtonal 3y ago
Just for clarification, you mean MINIX. Fun fact, even Andrew Tanenbaum only learned about this through news coverage: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/ https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
- adastra22 3y ago
  Thanks, was posting from mobile and memory.
robertlagrant 3y ago
I don't know why this comment got downvoted? Purely on spelling?
kjs3 3y ago
I would argue that MINIX being used by one company for one application that isn't visible to users and doesn't (as far as I know) contribute any code back to the wider MINIX community (which is a thing) means it really isn't in the same conversation with Linux and *BSD. YMMV.

TheDong 3y ago

That's the wrong framing for Hurd. Hurd isn't a "product" that's trying to "win" by beating competitors. It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. You might as well ask "How can my local pick-up basketball team find a niche to make money, like NBA players do? Can we all wear more colorful jerseys so TV stations cover us?" No, that's silly, the point of the pick-up basketball team isn't to make money, it isn't to beat a competitor, like the NBA, for sports coverage, it's to hang out with friends and have fun. That's what many free software projects are like. And if enough people come to hang out and have fun, it might organically become bigger and better, but if you start making it the point of it, it ruins it. If you tell the pick-up basketball people "No, you can't join, you're not photogenic enough", you won't have friends soon. If you start telling hurd developers "We need to take on MS, stop working on that thing you care about, no one else cares about it", the project will die.

LambdaComplex 3y ago
> It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it. Okay, then tell us why we should care about it when more popular operating systems fit our needs better anyways.
- predictabl3 3y ago
  They really should just rename the site CapitalistNews or AntiHackerNews or MiddleManagementNews or PMTechNews. Man, y'all are gonna be so mad when you find out some people work on OSS projects for fun or ideological reasons. Again, a sentiment that needs repeating far too often here, not everything is about, or for, you.
  - justsid 3y ago
    I wrote a little kernel for fun in high school. I wish I still had the time to pick it back up again, or contribute to something like GNU/Hurd. Stuff like this is exactly the reason I became fascinated with programming. Not everyone here is a joyless sack of shit yet.
  - 3y ago

dale_glass 3y ago

Could be impossible? I mean, any unique features HURD has, Linux can easily copy, like with FUSE. The safety benefits are kind of dubious, in that we're not in the 90s anymore, restarting Windows 3 times a day. Modern kernels are very stable as it is, so more stability is barely noticeable. And we have containers and virtualization.

prettyStandard 3y ago

cmrdporcupine has a good answer for this below. Target RISC-V. Does it match the ideology? From my limited understanding, I think so.