4 ms·

What does it mean for one of the most successful and influential opensource projects to not be ready for "prime time"?

tsimionescu 3y ago
They are referring to GNU HURD, which is indeed not ready for prime time, not to all of GNU with that line. It's a decent hook to grab your attention while still being fully accurate. The second half of the article is of course about the massive success of the GNU project.
- alex_smart 3y ago
  >It's a decent hook to grab your attention while still being fully accurate Well in that case, it had the exact opposite of the intended effect on me.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Heh, fair enough.
bunabhucan 3y ago
>It is arguable that in the sort of narrow, specific sense that Stallman himself tends to favor, the GNU Project failed. There isn't a complete, working GNU OS. An operating system is a stack of components, from the visible user-facing stuff to the kernel, and the GNU kernel, the also recursively named Hurd, is still incomplete and not ready for daily use, even after all this time.
- fatfingerd 3y ago
  While true I think this shows the discounting of real labor costs in OSes.. If Hurd were magically granted every possible resource to be complete and on par with everything else in 1993 it would have needed far more resources in the last 30 years to still be a complete OS today, since it wasn't complete it is very hard for it to get even a small portion of those resources.
baz00 3y ago
I would suggest that they need more POSIX incompatible flags adding to all the commands.
godzillabrennus 3y ago
That Stallman is the bottleneck. He’s too controversial. In September 2006, Stallman wrote, "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing." In 2019, after conversations with victims, he changed his opinion that it does cause harm.
- lynx23 3y ago
  How is this relevant to FLOSS or the FSF?
- gettodachoppa 3y ago
  So a hippie boomer held some hippie boomer belief, then after speaking to people affected by it, he realized he was wrong and changed his mind. And this is a problem because? I'm more likely to donate to the FSF than to any of those bland, soulless American "we hecking love corpo-FOSS" HR drones like the OSI and the other vultures who tried to take him out a couple of years back. If Stallman is replaced by a fake corpo-drone, I'd never donate, just as I stopped for Mozilla.
- pahbloo 3y ago
  Even ignoring opinions not related to software, Stallman is still controversial; he's a radical advocate for software freedom. And FSF is a radical organization, too. People and institutions with radical positions are unlikely to achieve mainstream acceptance. But, radical positions are a needed influence in the ecosystem, helping to keep the balance. So, I think that after all FSF is a succesfull organization.

They are referring to GNU HURD, which is indeed not ready for prime time, not to all of GNU with that line. It's a decent hook to grab your attention while still being fully accurate. The second half of the article is of course about the massive success of the GNU project.

alex_smart 3y ago
>It's a decent hook to grab your attention while still being fully accurate Well in that case, it had the exact opposite of the intended effect on me.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Heh, fair enough.

bunabhucan 3y ago

>It is arguable that in the sort of narrow, specific sense that Stallman himself tends to favor, the GNU Project failed. There isn't a complete, working GNU OS. An operating system is a stack of components, from the visible user-facing stuff to the kernel, and the GNU kernel, the also recursively named Hurd, is still incomplete and not ready for daily use, even after all this time.

fatfingerd 3y ago
While true I think this shows the discounting of real labor costs in OSes.. If Hurd were magically granted every possible resource to be complete and on par with everything else in 1993 it would have needed far more resources in the last 30 years to still be a complete OS today, since it wasn't complete it is very hard for it to get even a small portion of those resources.

baz00 3y ago

I would suggest that they need more POSIX incompatible flags adding to all the commands.

godzillabrennus 3y ago

That Stallman is the bottleneck. He’s too controversial. In September 2006, Stallman wrote, "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing." In 2019, after conversations with victims, he changed his opinion that it does cause harm.

lynx23 3y ago
How is this relevant to FLOSS or the FSF?
gettodachoppa 3y ago
So a hippie boomer held some hippie boomer belief, then after speaking to people affected by it, he realized he was wrong and changed his mind. And this is a problem because? I'm more likely to donate to the FSF than to any of those bland, soulless American "we hecking love corpo-FOSS" HR drones like the OSI and the other vultures who tried to take him out a couple of years back. If Stallman is replaced by a fake corpo-drone, I'd never donate, just as I stopped for Mozilla.
pahbloo 3y ago
Even ignoring opinions not related to software, Stallman is still controversial; he's a radical advocate for software freedom. And FSF is a radical organization, too. People and institutions with radical positions are unlikely to achieve mainstream acceptance. But, radical positions are a needed influence in the ecosystem, helping to keep the balance. So, I think that after all FSF is a succesfull organization.