GNU Turns 40 | Hacker News Reader

GNU Turns 40

theregister.com

80 pointsgslin12 comments

Forty years of GNU and the free software movement - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37566424 - Sept 2023 (159 comments)

What does it mean for one of the most successful and influential opensource projects to not be ready for "prime time"?

They are referring to GNU HURD, which is indeed not ready for prime time, not to all of GNU with that line. It's a decent hook to grab your attention while still being fully accurate.

The second half of the article is of course about the massive success of the GNU project.

>It's a decent hook to grab your attention while still being fully accurate

Well in that case, it had the exact opposite of the intended effect on me.

Heh, fair enough.

>It is arguable that in the sort of narrow, specific sense that Stallman himself tends to favor, the GNU Project failed. There isn't a complete, working GNU OS. An operating system is a stack of components, from the visible user-facing stuff to the kernel, and the GNU kernel, the also recursively named Hurd, is still incomplete and not ready for daily use, even after all this time.

While true I think this shows the discounting of real labor costs in OSes.. If Hurd were magically granted every possible resource to be complete and on par with everything else in 1993 it would have needed far more resources in the last 30 years to still be a complete OS today, since it wasn't complete it is very hard for it to get even a small portion of those resources.

That Stallman is the bottleneck. He’s too controversial.

In September 2006, Stallman wrote, "I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing." In 2019, after conversations with victims, he changed his opinion that it does cause harm.

So a hippie boomer held some hippie boomer belief, then after speaking to people affected by it, he realized he was wrong and changed his mind. And this is a problem because?

I'm more likely to donate to the FSF than to any of those bland, soulless American "we hecking love corpo-FOSS" HR drones like the OSI and the other vultures who tried to take him out a couple of years back. If Stallman is replaced by a fake corpo-drone, I'd never donate, just as I stopped for Mozilla.

Even ignoring opinions not related to software, Stallman is still controversial; he's a radical advocate for software freedom. And FSF is a radical organization, too. People and institutions with radical positions are unlikely to achieve mainstream acceptance. But, radical positions are a needed influence in the ecosystem, helping to keep the balance. So, I think that after all FSF is a succesfull organization.

How is this relevant to FLOSS or the FSF?

I would suggest that they need more POSIX incompatible flags adding to all the commands.

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