Re: that old GNU/Linux argument

On Jul 22, 2008, Bruno Wolff III <bruno@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 22:34:39 -0300,
Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Jul 22, 2008, Bruno Wolff III <bruno@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

Do you have any evidence of that?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Hurd sounds about right to me.

Me too, but it seems to agree with my point; that Hurd development
was glacially slow before Linux was released,

Yup, I wrote that, and the web page supports this claim:

] It is true that HURD's choice of kernel model slowed things down,

so I don't see any reason to claim that the existance of Linux
slowed its development.

Indeed, the web page doesn't support this statement:

] but the main factor for its slow development since 1992 was that a
] Free kernel that worked with the GNU operating system was available.

Sorry, it wasn't clear which point you wanted supporting evidence for.


The latter is based on things I heard at speeches and read, such as
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/12/229240#

Unfortunately, the interview is no longer available, but this comment
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23686&cid=2556745 is
(admittedly thin) evidence to back up my statement.

Regardless, it actually makes a lot of sense, once you take into
account the goals of the FSF and of the Free Software movement in
general. "Developing Hurd" is not a goal in itself. Enabling people
to use computers is freedom is the ultimate goal. To this end, the
most urgent need was a complete operating system. That's GNU.

Every OS needs a kernel, so Hurd was part of the plan to address the
most urgent need. Turns out it still needed a lot of work when Linux
came up. Once Linux became Free and, years down the road, was shown
to be portable (a major concern for RMS, after having had to rewrite
operating systems after hardware platform changes), the need for a
complete operating system was mostly addressed.

While GNU software still had to be maintained, development efforts
could from that point on be focused on other urgent software needs
that couldn't be satisfied with Free Software. E.g., you'll see a
kernel is not listed on http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority.html

Hurd is still a technically interesting project, and there's no point
in killing it while there are people interested in working on it. But
there isn't any need for the FSF to focus efforts on it either. It
wouldn't significantly advance the goals of the movement.

--
Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Free Software Evangelist oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
FSFLA Board Member ¡Sé Libre! => http://www.fsfla.org/
Red Hat Compiler Engineer aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}

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