Cost was not the only problem with Minix, although it was pretty hefty (it would have been about $180 in todays dollars for me in the UK). For students (as both I and Linus were) that was a lot of money.

AST was firmly of the belief in Minix as being educational code, and hence only accepted patches along those lines. I don't remember if there was copyright assignment too, but there must have been something similar. This was at odds with the people who wanted to use Minix as their operating system.

For example the Minix of the time only supported 16 bit mode on x86 which meant no memory protection and only using about half a megabyte of memory on multi-megabyte machines. Someone produced fairly large patches that let it work in 32 bit mode, but they were never distributed as part of Minix because they didn't further the education goal (more code, harder to read and understand etc).

Another example was that the filesystem code was single threaded and only handled one request at a time. This meant easy to read and understand code, but dismal performance. Again this hindered those trying to use Minix versus those learning from it. This was such an issue that the original Linux announcement has this line:

    PS. Yes – it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs.

Essentially Minix wasn't seriously usable, cost a lot, was not open source/community oriented, and was not progressing towards being usable. That is why so many of us jumped on Linux because it immediately worked, didn't cost anything, was 32 bit, had a rapid pace of development, and was trying to be usable.

On the Hurd side, there never was anything you could actually download and use. It was also developed very strongly in the cathedral style as many GNU projects were. Of course the promises were that "soon" there would be something. But Linux was there now and accepted patches without copyright assignment, and had rapid releases.

Hurd simply never was ready and/or welcoming outsiders that might have pulled it in a direction where the anointed did not want it to go (such as, actually releasing something).

Hurd and Minix both missed critical windows of opportunity and ended up so far behind Linux that they might as well not have bothered. For the longest time the only thing that kept new people flooding into Minix was Tanenbaums courses at VU.

Hurd was a research project as much as a working kernel.

I Think the project restarted 3 times in 10 years...

Linux may have been crude etc, but it was here, it was working, and it was free (in both senses of the word).

Frankly i see the lack of Linux on the desktop less about the quality of Linux, and more about MS abusing its market position and a massive failure to regulate.

Hurd failed mostly due to managerial incompetence. RMS was insistent on sticking with a Mach base, which at the time was both unfamiliar to his team and encumbered in licensing limbo. Thomas Bushnell, the former Hurd project leader, has said that if his plan to adopt a 4.4BSD-Lite kernel had been greenlit, then Hurd might have succeeded and Linux could have been a footnote.

Of course, if the BSD kernel plan went through, then Hurd would be quite different architecturally today. I'm not sure how versatile it actually was, though - perhaps a multiserver design still might have been possible.

See: http://www.h-online.com/open/features/GNU-HURD-Altered-visio...