Re: Three silly questions to the Hurd-Core
On Sat, 11 Mar 2000 21:39:17 EST, the world broke into rejoicing as
"Lucas C. Wagner" <lwagner@spindletp.com> said:
> > This is very wrong, please don't make such errornous statements in the
> > public. It only alienates people.
>
> Well, aside from the political correctness, I would say many people view it
> as a replacement for the Linux kernel even if those are not the words that
> you would choose to say them in. RMS's dogmatics don't help the issue and
> many Linux users say worse things about the Hurd because of Torvalds'
> discussion a while back. I think they can withstand a few comments like
> these... however, I will not make them in the future, now that you have
> pointed it out. ;-)
It's almost certainly more complex than that, as there have been
various positions by various people over the years:
"I am aware of the benefits of a micro kernel approach. However, the
fact remains that Linux is here, and GNU isn't --- and people have
been working on Hurd for a lot longer than Linus has been working on
Linux." -- Ted T'so, 1992.
"Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from
now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M
SPARCstation-5." -- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1992.
"You'll be rid of most of us when BSD-detox or GNU comes out, which
should happen in the next few months (yeah, right)." -- Richard Tobin,
1992. [BSD did follow within a year]
And I seem to remember Linus Torvalds suggesting something about Linux
being a "stop gap" measure until "GNU" would become available.
More recently, RMS's comments have been rather more indicative of
backing away from the notion of Hurd being a *crucial* project.
Comments are more like: "There's enough done that it makes sense to
put *some* effort into getting it working."
At any rate, *none* of these comments are so strongly doctrinaire that
they should cause anyone great offense.
The *truth* is that some people either:
a) intend to give, or
b) intend to take
offense, and any old excuse will do.
There are a few people that are so anti-RMS or anti-GNU or anti-FSF
(or multiple combinations thereof) that any mention of something like
Hurd will cause their heads to explode, virtually speaking...
--
"It has every known bug fix to everything." -- KLH (out of context)
cbbrowne@ntlug.org - <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
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