I apologize in advance for such a brazenly ignorant question: But why is it that this small team is able to produce a working microkernel, yet GNU Herd and (more recently) Google's Fuchsia have languished eternally as vaporware?
jackpot51 describes himself in his bio as a "BDFL of Redox OS" which means he's likely personally passionate and just does what he thinks is best. This will likely not lead to a better outcome than Herd and Fuchsia would lead to but it will lead to an outcome within our lifetimes.
In many cases, however, "working" is better than "planned"
The reason stuff doesn't take off is that it never takes off. Implementing an OS is actually not hard. You can get pretty far as a 1-person project provided you have the time. Real world use and other people adopting your stuff is harder.
I can’t imagine how difficult it would have been to get support in 94, but 2020?!
If so, besides the hurd (and all the debian packages that build and run for it), there's Minix 3, HelenOS and Genode (specifically Sculpt) to look into.
>the project has been going since 2015
True, but Fuchsia started only a year later
>Fuchsia is a lot more than a microkernel, right?
Indeed, but that is also true of Redox!