GNU HURD: Altered visions and lost promise

Hurd's current status should be considered in the context of how the GNU project is run. In the early days GNU had some paid developers, but now their projects are run purely on a volunteer basis. Or in the case projects like GCC, developers that are paid by companies to work on GNU projects.

Hurd is late because there isn't any need for it anymore, we now have plenty of free kernels. And GNU isn't sponsoring it because of that, just like it isn't sponsoring a GNU MTA.

But work continues because a few people are still interested. There's a lot of neat ideas in Hurd. You get a lot of nice things once you move most of the kernel to user-space.

The best example of this is custom user-mounted filesystems (translators). You can e.g. mount a remote FTP site on Hurd in ~/ftp without being a superuser, this is something that GNOME and KDE implement on their own because users can't do it on other systems without special permissions.

Linux has been accumulating a lot of microkernel-like features over the years. E.g. dynamic loading of device drivers, FUSE etc. In time it'll probably usurp every useful Hurd feature worth having.

I don't think the article mentioned it but there was a point well after the Linux kernel reached prominence that it was understood the HURD was just a back burner project. GNU has still had a huge impact on everything from IT data centers to Apple, and arguably you wouldn't even have initiatives like Wikipedia without it either. It's like the building block that allowed everyone else to place a cherry.

This story is full of irony. My favorite open source moment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDxMJQLXmBE

I was one of the hacker employees of the FSF back in the early days of the HURD project. They pay was modest by industry standards but fair (every employee, hacker or not, got the same pay -- later the formation of a union was encouraged).

Some very good and lasting work got done back then, in spite of our rather unconventional work habits. I'm thinking especially of all the work done laying down the foundation of GNU libc. Roland McGrath got a lot of code rolling and, perhaps more importantly, established a pretty good standard of coding conventions and quality expectations.

I did not myself work directly on the HURD but in our small office I did have chats with McGrath and Bushnell about it. The sentiment around the design was, I think it fair to say, somewhat giddy. The free software movement was (and is) all about freeing users from subjugation to those who provide software. The HURD's microkernel architecture and the structure of the daemons would securely free users from subjugation to system administrators - each user could securely invoke a set of daemons to create the operating environment he or she wished, no special permissions required.

It was well understood back then, and even a point of discussion in academia, that a microkernel architecture posed some difficult problems for performance (related mostly to a greater number of context switches as messages pass between daemons rather than syscalls being handled by a monolithic kernel). Rashid's work had suggested that this problem was not so terribly significant after all. And so, at least to me, it felt like the GNU project was not only doing this shoestring-budget freedom-fighting hacking, but also leading near the bleeding edge of CS research made practical. Well, that was the theory, anyway, and we were mighty proud of ourselves and generally excited to be there.

Not much but some of the hacking of the core staff took place "from home". You must remember that this before any kind of data over voice or particularly high bandwidth connection was commonplace - so that hacking was over modem connected to text terminal. Mostly we hacked in a shared office which, if you saw it, you'd think "Wow, that's a slightly large closet." We were, at that time, guests of MIT.

With all due respect for RMS, and I don't think he'd especially disagree with this (though I could be wrong): he was an absolutely terrible project leader for the hacking part. As history has shown, his popularity among some notwithstanding, he's extraordinarily good at the political part of his works. Leading the technical project? Not so much.

It wasn't so much that he dictated bad technical choices. Even the choice to use Mach might have worked out. On the contrary, he was relatively "hands off" in most technical matters, only micromanaging if you really dragged his attention to some detail. It was more that he lacked any coherent overall strategy for completing GNU and his broad directives involved underestimations of the amount of work involved and were sometimes scattered, even bordering on inconsistent. It just wasn't his strength.

The original vision for the GNU system, at least as I understood it, was to - sure - grow a unix clone, but then to build a user space that much more closely resembled that of lisp machines. Emacs (with its lisp extensibility) was taken to be a paradigm for how interactive programs might work. Originally, it was even envisioned that the window system would be lisp based.

One early change to the original GNU vision occurred when it became clear that X11 worked pretty well and was here to stay and would be free software. As a practical matter: just use that.

Later, as mentioned in other comments here, the ECGS fork of GCC caused issues - ultimately leading to the displacement of an FSF appointed project leader. There is some back story to that. The company Cygnus (later acquired by Red Hat, founded by M. Tiemann et al.) had been advertising to customers that not only could they develop customized extensions to GCC, but that they could shepherd those extensions into the "official releases". There was frustration at Cygnus and some other firms that the FSF branch was not merging these changes quickly enough or was arguably being too prickly about the nature of the changes. As nearly as I can tell those sentiments led to the ECGS fork and RMS was ultimately put in the position of having to choose between "blessing" that fork or simply losing any claim at all to the future of GCC.

Around this time, I am told but can not myself verify, RMS was also under pressure from some key FSF advisors or supporters to exit the software development business and focus on the politics. Whatever the motivation, the FSF shed most of its in-house development efforts.

The pattern of losing the original GNU vision continued in the controversy over Gnome vs. KDE. Originally, KDE had licensing issues and did not pass muster with the FSF as being free software. Those problems have since been fixed but at the time it led to RMS' proclamation that Gnome would be the desktop for GNU -- a radical departure from what was originally conceived. Later, as you may have read, RMS came to describe Miguel as a traitor to the free software movement.

Somewhere in there - I'd have to look things up to get the timelines exactly right - Debian took off, in part to try to fill a void in the FSF's leadership at assembling a complete GNU system. Bruce Perens penned the now famous "Debian Guidelines".

A small group of relatively wealthy influencers, including Tiemann, met with Eric Raymond and conjured up the allegedly business-friendly "open source" notion. The main differentiation they sought from the FSF is that they would not condemn proprietary software or describe themselves as a freedom movement - they sought to emphasize the economic advantages of having volunteers do work for no pay. In my view, their main purpose upon founding was to attempt to politically marginalize RMS (a project in which they've had some success).

Bushnell moved on to a different stage of his life and, I guess it's fair to say, a higher calling. McGrath moved on to what I gather is a sweet job for Red Hat. The GNU project was gutted. Its institutional memory and such momentum as it may have had was gone. This was in part because RMS was not so great as a project leader but also, in large part, because the project was under significant attack.

In my humble opinion, there would be plenty good to come of a resurrection of the GNU project. I don't necessarily mean a resurrection of the HURD although I suspect we can do better than the Linux kernel. I do mean a return to a concentrated effort to build the kind of user space originally envisioned. While such a project could have enormous social benefit, I don't see any way to institute it and find support enough to carry it out.

I'm a little leery of history like this that ignores the impact of the AT&T lawsuit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD#Net.2F2_and_legal_troubles

E.g.:

"Linus Torvalds has said that if 386BSD had been available at the time, he probably would not have created Linux."

This is a story with a theme, a theme of stubborn refusal to admit failure in the face of the huge successes of others. Linux showed that open source can develop a vibrant operating system project. The BSDs have shown that a tightly controlled engineering effort can be achieved within an open source context. And Apple has shown that you can even make an operating system off of the Mach lineage! When faced with repeated failure, one has to look at the common denominators. It's GNU.

"While such a project could have enormous social benefit, I don't see any way to institute it and find support enough to carry it out."

I'd support that project. And I suspect that many other people would too.

MVP.