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I'm sure there will be a few people chuckling at the news that the Hurd is still under development. Yesterday I learned from one of my colleagues that the newe
by duncan_bayne 12y ago
I'm sure there will be a few people chuckling at the news that the Hurd is still under development.
Yesterday I learned from one of my colleagues that the newer versions of OSX will only run kernel extensions signed by Apple.
The need for the GNU project is as great now as it was in the 1980s.
- duncan_bayne 12y ago... and there's the inevitable downvote for criticising Apple. If you disagree with my assertion that Apple is providing a need for software freedom in 2015, please post it. I'd love to discuss it; voting buttons are no substitute for discourse.
- ics 12y agoUnless your post is blasted into oblivion it could just as well be fat-fingering an upvote on mobile.
- bsaul 12y agoYes, that the weirdest UX feature of HN. In the age of mobile, having two 10px high buttons with opposite meaning separated by 5pixel is absurd.
- joshuapants 12y agoAnd the complete inability to change your vote after the fact.
- mavhc 12y agoPerhaps they don't want people to use it on mobiles, if they want to encourage longer comments and more in depth articles perhaps.
- nothrabannosir 12y agoBad UI keeps everyone but the most desperate (hello) at bay. 4chan used to do the same to increase the signal/noise ratio.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- azinman2 12y agoDo you need a minimum karma level for that? I don't ever have any down arrows and have always wondered. I'm near 500 karma so kinda surprised. Probably in some faq that I'm too lazy to lookup
- szatkus 12y agoAFAIK it's 500. You are close :)
- azinman2 12y agoThe power... THE POWER!!!!!!!!!!!
- crististm 12y agoMany years ago you did not need any karma to down-vote anything. That has changed a long time ago and for years I refrained to get higher karma just to regain the ability to down-vote. It seems there is a 500 karma threshold for down-voting comments and another one to down-vote posts. Edit: And another karma level to down-vote comments beaten to death.
- agumonkey 12y agoI'm now very fond to see old ambitious project being alive without trendy interest and funding. I don't even think HURD is as revolutionary as it was when it started, but still a very (very very) nice contribution to biodiversity. And, of course, the OSS spirit embedded within. I suggest people to look for Samuel Thibault past talks about HURD to see how different layering of components open for fine usages (mounting remote .isos from FTP without suffering too much).
- jheriko 12y agoi'm chuckling a bit. but then the whole GNU ecosystem is about catering to a tiny minority with special priorities... inside of an even tinier minority of users of open source OSes. I'm sure I am just an outsider who doesn't really understand the needs or the motivations... Linux does well in the server world, and Apple get a lot of attention, but even then, between them, they account for something like 4% of OS installs. I'm also not sure there is much need for GNU. The licenses are absolutely awful for things that claim to be free... sometimes if something is using LGPL with exceptions it will see some serious reuse (Qt as an example) but the GPL license is a great way to stop a project ever reaching its full potential due to its viral nature.
- yellowapple 12y ago> they account for something like 4% of OS installs. From a desktop perspective, yes, but Linux at this point has a majority stake in pretty much every other realm of computing.
- madez 12y agoDo you realize that mobile devices like smartphones and tablets most often have a linux-based or an apple-delivered OS? Following Gartner [1], 60% of all devices shipped in 2014 have an OS based on Linux or delivered by Apple. Do you think that a law that prohibits making other people slaves is non-free in nature? Because the GPL prohibits something similiar. [1] https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2954317 https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2954317
- stonogo 12y agoYour invocation of slavery to generate sympathy for your political goals is disgusting.
- joshuapants 12y agoNo, it's quite similar. The GPL doesn't inhibit freedom, it inhibits the power to erode freedom.
- e40 12y agoYesterday I learned from one of my colleagues that the newer versions of OSX will only run kernel extensions signed by Apple. Oh, no, won't this kill or greatly hurt the hackintosh community's ability to install on non-Apple hardware?
- MichaelGG 12y agoI would imagine that hacking out that bit of code would just be another hurdle to cross in making a Hackintosh? So long as the hardware doesn't require Secure Boot, anyways.
- ghshephard 12y agoGiven that this is a user controllable option - no.
- 0x0 12y agoWindows has required code signing for kernel drivers since Vista on x64. Also, OSX doesn't require the kexts to be signed by Apple themselves - the requirement is that the kext is signed by a certificate that is blessed by Apple's CA. There are plenty of third party kexts out there. Also, you can modify the bootloader's kernel parameters to disable kext signing and you will be back where you were on 10.9 security-wise. A much bigger problem is how Microsoft is no longer requiring Windows 10 compatible PCs to ship with a way to disable Secure Boot.
- Demiurge 12y ago>Also, OSX doesn't require the kexts to be signed by Apple themselves - the requirement is that the kext is signed by a certificate that is blessed by Apple's CA. There are plenty of third party kexts out there. I'm curious who has Apple blessed to do so, and what those kexts are?
- ptomato 12y agoAnybody who pays the $99/year to be an OS X developer and hasn't subsequently had their cert revoked for distributing malware.
- Demiurge 12y agoWell, that's quite accessible. Good to know, thanks.
- easytiger 12y agoWhat a depressing attitude
- Demiurge 12y agoMaybe go see a doctor about that. Just because I'm asking a question and then not committing righteous suicide because of how great my first world problems are, doesn't mean I actually expressed an opinion about driver signing in general, one way or another.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> The need for the GNU project is as great now as it was in the 1980s. The need for F/OSS operating systems (kernel and related tools) is as great as it was in the 1980s. The significance of the GNU project in meeting that need is less than it was in the 1980s.
- quadrangle 12y agoThe GNU project is still significant, if less so overall, but HURD is the least important element since Linux-libre works fine.
- cbd1984 12y agoWhat does the Hurd have to do with the GNU Project as a whole? Haven't other kernels filled the role? It's possible to separate what the GNU Project does now from what it was originally slated to do 30+ years ago. Providing a solid userspace and suite of libraries is no less important than providing a specific kind of microkernel.
- meddlepal 12y agoOh the humanity that a company you willingly purchase a license from restricts you from doing whatever you want with it. Cry me a river.
- duncan_bayne 12y agoYou're perfectly correct, of course. You bought it, you deal with it. I just don't understand why developers, of all people, persist with systems like OSX and Windows.
- alextgordon 12y agoMany people prefer Apple hardware, and OS X gives a better experience on Apple hardware than Linux. (Ubuntu doesn't even provide a correct keyboard layout for my keyboard!)
- duncan_bayne 12y agoThat's what I don't get. Yes, Apple hardware is nice (although the XPS13 and X1 push them pretty hard. But I'd have thought that if there was a group that'd see beyond that and ask fundamental questions about openness, digital rights, etc. it'd be developers.
- melling 12y agoNot really, the opportunity cost means something else isn't getting done. Emacs, for instance, has had 440 years of development. https://www.openhub.net/p/emacs https://www.openhub.net/p/emacs If the FSF wants to make more of an impact, perhaps they should build software in a higher level language.
- tormeh 12y agoI dream of an OS written in Rust.
- ghshephard 12y agoHaving a $99 Developer ID is what I would consider an absolute minimum bar to be allowed to create a kext that can cause all sorts of havoc. And, as others have noted - you can always disable that feature if you don't like it.
- pwaring 12y agoThe need for the GNU project and philosophy is still great, I'm not sure there's a need for the Hurd though. We already have a popular, well-supported (by companies and individuals) kernel which is available under the GPL (and another which is available under the BSD licence, which provides useful competition). I think it would be better if the GNU project put their full weight behind Linux rather than trying to work on their own kernel which isn't getting any traction.
- antocv 12y ago> The need for the GNU project and philosophy is still great, I'm not sure there's a need for the Hurd though. We already have a popular, well-supported (by companies and individuals) kernel which is available under the GPL (and another which is available under the BSD licence, which provides useful competition) In 2017 or 2018 Microsoft releases "Microsoft Linux with containerized Office-by-wine-who-cares-how and selected applications available from the App Store" Then Microsoft ships another version of Microsoft Linux and breaks user-space, breaks ABI, other libraries, and brings in encryption-which-only-runs-Microsoft-signed-libraries-and-tools and other hassles which is effectively a fork of Linux kernel + most other tools. Microsoft becomes just like Apple - a leech on GNU and FOSS. Confusion is total, people are working on "free you see but not free" software. "Well free for me, developer, my employer, not for you user."
- pwaring 12y agoWhat does Hurd do to solve that problem? It has the same licence as Linux, so Microsoft could release 'Microsoft Hurd' in the same way.
- lmm 12y agoLinux has plenty of issues. It's more modular than it was it's a source-level monolith which means very poor support for old drivers that weren't merged into the tree for whatever reason. The recent tight coupling to systemd is making it much more so. The HURD design was always more elegant, and should result in a more stable and secure system. That's absolutely a project worth pursuing.
- legulere 12y agoI wonder why still so many people fall for the bullshit around GNU. You can turn off the kernel needing signed kernel extensions. It is a big annoyance - so much is true. You don't tell the reason why Apple is doing it - Security. That's the reason why Linux is also adopting it [1]. You do this to put Apple as the big evil in contrast to our saviour GNU (and RMS is Jesus or what?). But the thing is that you don't need GNU for a system with free software. Nobody needs Hurd when we have Linux. We also don't need GCC anymore as we have LLVM+Clang. The GNU project doesn't like that as they're becoming less and less needed. [1]: http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.7#head-a04c2b7827323d26a659b3b7cdf759747bb400d2 http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_3.7#head-a04c2b7827323d26a659...