http://www.softpanorama.org/People/Stallman/failure_with_hur...
The simple answer is that the hardware available at the time wasn't up to getting a useful level of performance out of the HURD microkernel architecture and so he gave up. HURD still isn't any closer to being a production kernel.
- Emacs was a politically important project because there had been a serious free-software kerfuffle among emacs-like editors. The most popular such editor for unix, Gosling emacs, had recently gone from open source to closed source without warning.
Create and deliver value. Demand to be paid for it according to its value to the customer. If the customer refuses to pay, find another customer.
Free is as successful as poverty.
Perhaps you are paid for the value you deliver. If not, why did you do it? However, it is a payment that cannot be transformed by exchanging it for other things you need or want. Its primary benefit resides within you and your child.
Money is not the only form of payment but it is an extremely important form. This is because of its use as a medium of exchange in a division of labor economy. The existence of both supports and sustains a far higher standard of living than could otherwise exist.
Stillman's philosophy is to reduce the production of intellectual values to the state of a barter economy. That kind of economy rises only slightly above subsistence. This is why I say "Free is as successful as poverty."
According to Stallman, one should only be able to trade software artifacts for other software artifacts. This is even worse than a barter economy. Its as if an egg producer could only trade his eggs for other eggs or a potato farmer could only trade his potatoes for other potatoes. This in one simple step eliminates a division of labor economy with all of its attendant benefits and multiplication of productivity.
Which result has the most fundamental impact? The restriction to trading software artifact for software artifact no matter what or allowing modification by anyone who cares. For the former, there is no choice. For the latter, there is the choice to modify or not. I suggest the former has a far more profound effect on the final result.
Perhaps our disagreement is that I think the results are mostly detrimental and you think they are mostly good. The question is good for whom and for what reason?
I don't think that I am the one who is being one dimensional here.
Therefore the purpose of the internal combustion engine is to waste the 82% of energy? :-)
To say the purpose of an internal combustion engine is not to use heat energy distorts the meaning of the words to the vanishing point by implying that the purpose of everything is not to use heat to the degree they don't do it.
The statement is "what it does". Its not "what it doesn't do".