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"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't." - Linus Torvalds, J

"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't." - Linus Torvalds, January 1992 17 years later and it still isn't! Makes you wonder about the whole GNU/Linux ecosystem had the GNU guys actually finished Hurd.

wheels 18y ago
Probably about the same. I think the biggest thing was splitting away from using a BSD kernel since the BSD projects are typically more, hmm, pedantic? Difficult to break into? Whatever. But the GNU led projects that have dealt with a lot of external contributors like GCC have fared quite well.
- javert 18y ago
  My sense is that the split from BSD was necessary because of licensing wars over proprietary code going on at the time. It wasn't until after Linux got going pretty well that BSD was established as being free of proprietary code, with some formerly proprietary parts rewritten (hence, FreeBSD).
- blasdel 18y ago
  No, GNU-led projects have had plenty of drama, GCC especially -- there was a huge forking fracas in the late nineties, and the FSF's politically-motivated crippling is largely the motivation behind LLVM's clang.
ken 18y ago
What does "finished" mean, with an operating system? You can install and run HURD today, including X. It doesn't support as much out-of-the-box as Linux does (I've heard about half of Debian), but it's certainly a lot further along than Linux was 10 years ago. Is Linux "finished"? What set of features makes it "finished"?
- qwe1234666 18y ago
  Linux is "finished" in the sense that it works at least on some computers, in a stable enough way to let you do serious work. There is no computer in the world you could throw at the Hurd and expect your work to not get eaten by a grue. The HURD is an unstable POS and if it wasn't enough they change their mind every few years and switch their choice of microkernel to the fashionable kernel-du-jour. From GNU Mach to L4 to debate about Coyotos to someone who's working on Viengoos. In comparison, NeXT took the Mach microkernel, turned it into a somewhat monolithic architecture and made a commercially available OS, that was bought by Apple and is now on 10% of the consumer computers of the world. OS X is not the perfect academic OS but people are using it to do real work on it. Musicians, photographers and so on are productive with it. I expect that in 2020 people will still talk about the HURD as the Duke Nukem Forever of operating systems.

wheels 18y ago

Probably about the same. I think the biggest thing was splitting away from using a BSD kernel since the BSD projects are typically more, hmm, pedantic? Difficult to break into? Whatever. But the GNU led projects that have dealt with a lot of external contributors like GCC have fared quite well.

javert 18y ago
My sense is that the split from BSD was necessary because of licensing wars over proprietary code going on at the time. It wasn't until after Linux got going pretty well that BSD was established as being free of proprietary code, with some formerly proprietary parts rewritten (hence, FreeBSD).
blasdel 18y ago
No, GNU-led projects have had plenty of drama, GCC especially -- there was a huge forking fracas in the late nineties, and the FSF's politically-motivated crippling is largely the motivation behind LLVM's clang.

ken 18y ago

What does "finished" mean, with an operating system? You can install and run HURD today, including X. It doesn't support as much out-of-the-box as Linux does (I've heard about half of Debian), but it's certainly a lot further along than Linux was 10 years ago. Is Linux "finished"? What set of features makes it "finished"?

qwe1234666 18y ago
Linux is "finished" in the sense that it works at least on some computers, in a stable enough way to let you do serious work. There is no computer in the world you could throw at the Hurd and expect your work to not get eaten by a grue. The HURD is an unstable POS and if it wasn't enough they change their mind every few years and switch their choice of microkernel to the fashionable kernel-du-jour. From GNU Mach to L4 to debate about Coyotos to someone who's working on Viengoos. In comparison, NeXT took the Mach microkernel, turned it into a somewhat monolithic architecture and made a commercially available OS, that was bought by Apple and is now on 10% of the consumer computers of the world. OS X is not the perfect academic OS but people are using it to do real work on it. Musicians, photographers and so on are productive with it. I expect that in 2020 people will still talk about the HURD as the Duke Nukem Forever of operating systems.