Whatever happened to the Hurd? – The story of the GNU OS

An oft-quoted phrase that applies here is "the enemy of good is 'better'".<p>Clearly RMS wanted his idea of perfection, and almost 30 years on, perfection remains out of reach while "good enough" rules the world on Linux.<p>An important lesson to learn.

I think that this article underestimate the ability of Linus Torvalds to manage the Linux developers community. Leadership, dispute resolution, technical choices, compatibility or new features, and teven flamewars. It's very difficult to be a BDFL.<p>The idea is that if Linux were not available, the open source community would have been working in Hurd and not in Linux. But without Linus perhaps the community could not exist (new member leave after a few quarrels) or all the effort is lost in complete rewrites.

Can someone explain to me if the problem with Hurd was that the basic idea was impossible, or it was the way they went about it?<p>i.e. was it the relentless restarting of the project that was to blame, or did they keep restarting because every way they approached it turned out to be impossible?

For those interested, Debian is planning on releasing a Hurd variant just like they did with kFreeBSD. <a href="http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/index" rel="nofollow">http://www.debian.org/ports/hurd/index</a>

Can anyone tell me how computing would be different today if micro kernels had taken off? If everyone working on Linux had been working on Gnu Hurd?

Note: RMS think Linux is "good enough" and Linux-libre is part of GNU, so Linux will be used for the in-development official GNU "distro".

I think there is another story: Not that many people where working on GNU.

“My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today."<p>So true. It's unfortunate AT&#38;T/Unix System Laboratories kept the BSD kernel code locked up in a lawsuit. Would have loved the article to have had a deeper insight into that as Stallman had already chosen to abandon Hurd by the time Linux came around.<p>It wasn't just that Linux was available, it was that BSD wasn't. It's too bad that the last few years have seen a decline in FreeBSD / other BSD OS's especially as it is an amazing operating system still light years ahead of GNU/Linux is many areas. Not to mention that it's one unified OS rather than hundreds of GNU/Linux distros.<p>One can only imagine what would have happened had the BSD code not been tied up in lawsuits. I bet they would have gone with the mature BSD kernel, leading to a better OS, and Linux would probably be a footnote in history if that.<p>Interesting how inferior technology wins a lot more than it loses. That said, I still love GNU/Linux. :)

So if things like Arch Hurd exist... Are we just missing the user interest in Hurd or are there usability problems with it or?

&#62; Linus Torvalds had begun his project to write a UNIX-like kernel for the IBM 386.<p>IBM 386? What in the world is an IBM 386?

It sank like a turd.