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RMS Says Hurd Could Be Loosed in 2002
Mark Cappel writes "According to PCWorld, RMS said in an interview in India that Hurd will see the light of day this year."
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Quoting the article: "Linux is a kernel, and now we have our kernel, which is an alternative to Linux, and they both work in the context of the overall GNU system, as the kernel alone won't run without the rest of the system ," he said.
Linux alone actually runs quite well, though not doing much of interest. But by adding only a few (non-GNU, I believe) tools to the kernel, it is quite capable as, for example, a router.
I read the following in the article:
"In India there are a number of people who are capable of seeing free software as an ethical and social issue, whereas in many parts of the world very few people recognize the ethical and social issues, and they are more interested in the practical benefits of today's free software," Stallman said.
I think it has nothing to do with India in specific. It has more to do with that getting people to pay software when they do not have the money is the issue.
Last time I checked Indian programmers want to be paid just as much as everyone else on this planet. It is just right now that Indian programmers are getting shafted and paid less than they rightfully deserve.
While the FSF does not preclude getting paid, it makes it DAMM difficult. If you look at the past Slashdot arcticles you can see a good business model is what makes sense. I would like the FSF to consider the fact that people have mortgages, children and college.
Sure there are companies that are doing ok. IE Redhat, but Redhat is one of the few. The rest are having problems as witnessed by the slashdot articles. Philosphical arguments are easy when you are feed, clothed and have a roof over your head.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
"FreeBSD is not doing as well as Linux. Why? Buzzword Bingo."
;)
No, it's down to hardware driver lack of support.
When I can't install FreeBSD on my Vaio but NetBSD works, I don't use FreeBSD.
When the Linux kernel recognises my dodgy eetherpro/100B("Sony") NIC, but the Hurd doesn't, I run Linux.
The fun question is: if the source is openly available for linux to support a given bit of kit, would someone want to take the code and use it gratuitously (munging licensing arrangements as need be) or do they want to preserve independence and duplicate effort? The latter has the advantage of providing alternatives but doubles the creating and debugging effort. Not to mention, I'm a lazy fellow as well.
More and more I think we're heading for a different singularity: modularity. "Kernel by Hurd, userspace by netbsd, hardware.networking by linux", you name it.
Now the Openness of Source more or less allows this, how about some cross-OS distributions?
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
So, since binary-only drivers and such are not allowed with HURD (that is what I take from the above, informative posting), there will be much less supported hardware, to say the least, then is possible with linux. If the HURD just MUST stick to some politically correct position no matter what, then kiss your nvidia cards goodbye on it. Kiss a lot of very desireable products and services goodbye.
If the whole HURD thing will have some leeway for non-GPL stuff in certain circumstances, then maybe no problem but right now, from where I sit, you get a largely crippled system and you will simply NOT get all the makers of the truly DESIRED hardware to release their drivers to GPL.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.