On Sat, 11 Mar 2000 21:39:17 EST, the world broke into rejoicing as "Lucas C. Wagner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said: > > This is very wrong, please don't make such errornous statements in the > > public. It only alienates people. > > Well, aside from the political correctness, I would say many people view it > as a replacement for the Linux kernel even if those are not the words that > you would choose to say them in. RMS's dogmatics don't help the issue and > many Linux users say worse things about the Hurd because of Torvalds' > discussion a while back. I think they can withstand a few comments like > these... however, I will not make them in the future, now that you have > pointed it out. ;-)
It's almost certainly more complex than that, as there have been various positions by various people over the years: "I am aware of the benefits of a micro kernel approach. However, the fact remains that Linux is here, and GNU isn't --- and people have been working on Hurd for a lot longer than Linus has been working on Linux." -- Ted T'so, 1992. "Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5." -- Andrew Tanenbaum, 1992. "You'll be rid of most of us when BSD-detox or GNU comes out, which should happen in the next few months (yeah, right)." -- Richard Tobin, 1992. [BSD did follow within a year] And I seem to remember Linus Torvalds suggesting something about Linux being a "stop gap" measure until "GNU" would become available. More recently, RMS's comments have been rather more indicative of backing away from the notion of Hurd being a *crucial* project. Comments are more like: "There's enough done that it makes sense to put *some* effort into getting it working." At any rate, *none* of these comments are so strongly doctrinaire that they should cause anyone great offense. The *truth* is that some people either: a) intend to give, or b) intend to take offense, and any old excuse will do. There are a few people that are so anti-RMS or anti-GNU or anti-FSF (or multiple combinations thereof) that any mention of something like Hurd will cause their heads to explode, virtually speaking... -- "It has every known bug fix to everything." -- KLH (out of context) [EMAIL PROTECTED] - <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lsf.html>
