Hi Olaf! Before I respond to your specific points, I want to put something out there that speaks to anyone asking questions similar to the OP, but I think will give a bit more insight into what I'm saying and what I'm not saying.
The hurd-ng project, to the extent that there remains a project, is really very open ended. Any sufficiently motivated person who came along could make whatever they wanted to with it. As long as they follow the license of any code they use, they can make it into anything they like. They don't have to agree with the opinions of Shap or myself, they are free to make decisions that would make Thomas Bushnell look down his nose at them, and are free to ignore the opinions of Samuel or Richard. They are especially free to disagree with anything Marcus or Neal held dear, since it's not possible to work against people who aren't actually working on the project. This is a corollary of freedom 0, of course, but it is especially the case in a project that has zero contributors active in ~7 years. Sure, there are projects that take some heritage or inspiration from hurd-ng that are active, and it may be more constructive to work along with Richard on X15 than to do your own thing. But the one thing that stands out to me from the open source community is that every time someone tells you what you should or shouldn't be building, you can feel free to loudly ignore them. I would have been a lot more productive in my first decade in open source if I'd just stopped talking to unhelpful people with agendas. To that extent, I'm not telling anyone what they should or shouldn't do with hurd-ng at this point, nor am I going to justify decisions I've made in a new project I started in September. I'm just going to keep working on the free and secure operating system I've craved, and that obviously GNU and The HURD remains a central part of that. You can probably tell from my previous email that I'm still kind of mired in low-level nonsense at this point and don't have anything useful to share about it. What I do feel is worth talking about, however, is what is difficult and what is not. -- William Leslie Q: What is your boss's password? A: "Authentication", clearly Notice: Likely much of this email is, by the nature of copyright, covered under copyright law. You absolutely MAY reproduce any part of it in accordance with the copyright law of the nation you are reading this in. Any attempt to DENY YOU THOSE RIGHTS would be illegal without prior contractual agreement.
