>You are not going to win going head to head with the entrenched competitors.

Linux, (not big and professional like gnu), is not going to win but could find a niche somewhere. Hm, ok.

Yep, it found a "niche": people could actually hack on it and get it to do stuff, rather than waiting around for the other thing, which wasn't even really a thing yet anyway.

Linux has a large, large established user base at this point. If you want to attract people to a different platform, you need a compelling reason.

For people just looking to look/experiment/learn/play, 'something new' that's more easily understood because it's small might be enough, but that's unlikely to be a large user base.

Going off base, as this is about Hurd vs GNU/Linux.

On the IoT space it seems like not everyone is keen in having to deal with GPL and Linux, hence the myriad of FOSS MIT/Apache licensed OSSes that now exist.

Zephyr, NuttX, Mbed, Amazon RTOS, Redox, Tock...

And then there still the commercial alternatives.

Linux is amazing what you can do with it. You can implement things in a day that you simply couldn't afford otherwise. And it's probably a 100-1000 times less reliable than systems architected around actual RTOS's.

To be completely honest, there are people against the GPL just about everywhere. For the same reasons, there are also people just about anywhere that do find value in the GPL.

The license is there for a reason, and its working.

As for "competitors", that's pretty cool :)

I think you missed the point of that comment completely.

Which market segment does linux not totally dominate nowadays? Phones, big servers, embedded devices, HPC... Maybe you could argue desktops? Maybe? Still a very signficant player there however you dice it.

Going back to Linus' original email announcement then apply your framework and you don't predict linux competing anywhere let alone dominating everywhere. How could anyone? Smash Sun, IBM, HP all of them. No chance. None.

The future, it's really hard to predict except in hindsight.

The fact that Linux dominates does not entail that other architectural approaches may be more suitable for the task. Variety is the spice of life and the “Linux monoculture” might not be such a great thing. BeOS/Haiku, Plan9/Inferno, OS400, and Fuchisa are all fascinating lineages that excel in their chosen domains.

I don’t know enough about Hurd to say, but as an example MINUX found its niche as the control software for Intel’s management system. As a result MINUX is/was more widely deployed than Linux for a few years. Still might be.

Just for clarification, you mean MINIX. Fun fact, even Andrew Tanenbaum only learned about this through news coverage:

https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

Thanks, was posting from mobile and memory.

I don't know why this comment got downvoted? Purely on spelling?

I would argue that MINIX being used by one company for one application that isn't visible to users and doesn't (as far as I know) contribute any code back to the wider MINIX community (which is a thing) means it really isn't in the same conversation with Linux and *BSD. YMMV.

That's the wrong framing for Hurd. Hurd isn't a "product" that's trying to "win" by beating competitors.

It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it.

You might as well ask "How can my local pick-up basketball team find a niche to make money, like NBA players do? Can we all wear more colorful jerseys so TV stations cover us?" No, that's silly, the point of the pick-up basketball team isn't to make money, it isn't to beat a competitor, like the NBA, for sports coverage, it's to hang out with friends and have fun.

That's what many free software projects are like. And if enough people come to hang out and have fun, it might organically become bigger and better, but if you start making it the point of it, it ruins it. If you tell the pick-up basketball people "No, you can't join, you're not photogenic enough", you won't have friends soon. If you start telling hurd developers "We need to take on MS, stop working on that thing you care about, no one else cares about it", the project will die.

* * *

Software development definitely needs more ideology, principles, and ethics. When talented hackers get behind a project united on these matters great and interesting features occur spontaneously

When I say ideology, I'm referring moreso to both dogma and bruised egos, both of which the GNU project is rife with.

A lot of Hurds continued development is just predicated on "we don't want to admit Linux became a success" rather than any serious principles or ethics. Again, just look at the whole start-stop nature of its development.

I don't disagree that a lot of tech professionals could spare at least some basic regards for the ethics surrounding the software they create, but you're not gonna find that at the GNU project.

> When I say ideology, I'm referring moreso to both dogma and bruised egos, both of which the GNU project is rife with.

Then just say I don't like that Hurd is part of the GNU Project because I dont like what the latter does. In my opinion, it is very hard to deny that GNU Project / FSF take principles and ethics of software development very seriously. Some people even call them dogmatic for it.

You bring up Plan9 here as though it isn't in the same boat as Hurd. Hurd also has quirky file system stuff [1] and many other interesting and relatively novel features, but you seem to treat this totally differently from Plan9 with no real reason other than you haven't bothered dto learn about the features of Hurd.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/hurd/documentation/transla...

> It's a project that's being built by and for people that care about it.

Okay, then tell us why we should care about it when more popular operating systems fit our needs better anyways.

They really should just rename the site CapitalistNews or AntiHackerNews or MiddleManagementNews or PMTechNews.

Man, y'all are gonna be so mad when you find out some people work on OSS projects for fun or ideological reasons.

Again, a sentiment that needs repeating far too often here, not everything is about, or for, you.

I wrote a little kernel for fun in high school. I wish I still had the time to pick it back up again, or contribute to something like GNU/Hurd. Stuff like this is exactly the reason I became fascinated with programming.

Not everyone here is a joyless sack of shit yet.

People are missing the point of being asked here.

If "fun" and "idological reasons" are the reason there is a community around the project, then that is in fact the answer to the question, if a little vague.

For people still not understanding, it would be nice to have an explanation of what people find fun about it, especially as a user and not a developer, and what ideological reason exactly are driving it.

I'm glad someone gets it. I've been using Linux as my daily driver for about a decade at this point. I can understand the desire to hack on that for fun, because doing so would actually bring about a tangible improvement to my life.

I find the desire to work on a 30 year old operating system that still lacks USB support much more confusing.

As far as my understanding goes, there are 2 main reasons: 1. The very specific nature of the OS, which aims to be (in theory) very modular 2. You need to partake on a very clear idea of what software freedom means, in every sense of the word

I don't use Hurd, but I do get it. I feel it's quite simple.

Just because it isn't there yet doesn't mean one wouldn't want to hack on it from time to time

Again, no one is saying that everyone should care about Hurd. This just feels like an entire subthread about a strawman. I think your stance is entirely reasonable, and one I resonate with, but it felt like you expected Hurd enthusiasts to convince you that you should care. Which feels like missing the point, to me, at least.

Hurd is over 30 years old. It didn't get support for SATA drives until 2013. It still does not support USB devices, at all. Working on such an OS doesn't seem like it would be a good use of my time, especially when that time could be spent working on Linux, or a BSD.

Valuing my time doesn't make me a capitalist.

Hurd does not support USB devices, officially, just yet, but these are surely exciting times. Unless maybe you're a capitalist ;-) <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2023-06/msg00158...>

> why we should care about it when more popular operating systems fit our needs better

Linux started this way. If Linux reaches a point where it doesn't fill the needs of its users/developers better, they will pivot to another alternative, and Hurd is one of those future alternatives. See it as future insurance.

> And if enough people come to hang out and have fun

Is Hurd there? I mean, you obviously don't frame 'success' with an open source system in financial terms, but I would argue that developing a critical development mass is pretty important. Without that, the project will wither and die.

Open source is sort of an "attention economy", so the currency isn't dollars, but developer interest.

Fooling around with something for the joy of learning is a motivator, but I don't know that it's enough to sustain a project, long term.

And Hurd very much is a 'product' in the economic sense, whether it's open source, not for profit, or whatever.

Could be impossible?

I mean, any unique features HURD has, Linux can easily copy, like with FUSE.

The safety benefits are kind of dubious, in that we're not in the 90s anymore, restarting Windows 3 times a day. Modern kernels are very stable as it is, so more stability is barely noticeable.

And we have containers and virtualization.

cmrdporcupine has a good answer for this below. Target RISC-V. Does it match the ideology? From my limited understanding, I think so.