On Wednesday, 10 February 2016 at 18:31:22 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
wrote:
On 02/10/2016 01:09 PM, Joakim wrote:
Pretty funny that he chose Stallman as his example of a guy
who gets
stuff done, whose Hurd microkernel never actually got done, :)
though
certainly ambitious, so Stallman would never have had a FOSS
OS on which
to run his GNU tools if it weren't for Linus.
[Unimportant theorizing ahead...]
I wouldn't say that's necessarily true: It could be argued the
existence and proliferation of the Linux kernel reduced the
priority of his Hurd work, even if only to a subconscious
extent. If it hadn't been for the Linux kernel, maybe there
would have been more drive (and more contributors) to Hurd.
Also because context switching got from a handful of cycle at the
time to about 1000 cycles on modern CPU, making the idea of
microkernel somewhat less attractive.
But saying Stallman released nothing is unfair. If we can
consider hurd a failure, he was also behind emacs, early gcc and
other things.
