after Linux, what? in place of Hurd, Eros, Brazil,...?

[Tom]

Personally, I'm not a technical or moral purist.  I want to see the success
of an OS that represents the types of values espoused by many in the OSS
community.

For success to be possible, some compromise is necessary.

Being a C++ programmer, I would have liked a C++ based OS, like BeOS.  But
if we each follow our own fancy then we will all end up having to use
Windows in our jobs (as I currently do).  Linux has, through whatever
process, become the OS for this community.

Tom.

"Toomas Karmo" <verbum-qazKcTl6WRFWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> wrote in
message news:20031029214601.GB2221-qazKcTl6WRGtq2lpoERdew at public.gmane.org
> Thanks to Christopher Browne (http://cbbrowne.com/info/)
> for opening up an important topic, making it clear that I had
> overstated the merits of Hurd:
>
> ((QUOTE))
> The problem is that Hurd is tied to Mach, which never really got
> properly finished, and which is tied to architectures that are rapidly
> getting obsolete.  Hurd only supports filesystems up to 1GB in size, to
> name the most problematic antifeature.  I can readily have more RAM than
> that on hardware that is relatively pedestrian.  And the hardware I
> _want_ supports on the order of 16GB.
>
> I can't see Hurd returning to interest without them implementing a fresh
> microkernel from scratch, which amounts to going pretty close to
> starting over, and at that point, it's likely sensible to call it
> something fresh.
>
> Of course, by that point, it might be as sensible for (say) DragonFly
> BSD (a project to build a highly threaded, message passing kernel) to be
> run with a Debian or BSD Ports "user space" and have the improvements
> we'll be looking for...
> ((/QUOTE))
>
> I hereby recant. It's now NOT clear that Hurd is the Next Great Thing.
>
> At this point
> I'd like to ask whether anyone can peer into a crystal ball and see
> what the Next Great Thing might be. Rob Brockway has referred in passing
> to Eros, Brazil, and Plan9 as interesting operating systems. Do any of
> these have passionate backers? Is anyone  on the listserv
> keen to wade in and DEFEND Hurd?
>
> My motive for stirring up this hornet's nest is to improve some writing
> that I have been doing on the world as it is likely to be in 2184, when
> fossil fuels are exhausted and society is recovering from a
> general infrastructure
> collapse. I paint a picture of a culture that scrapes together
> enough energy from wind turbines to run light railways, and also to
> implement
> **SOME** of what Jeremy Rifkin has optimistically hailed as the
> impending "hydrogen economy". In
> the course of this writing (in that part of my
> narrative which depicts
> a stroll through far-future rural Kent, in the
> company of Saint Thomas More), I have the following historical
> flashback:
>
> ((HISTORICAL_FLASHBACK__IN_CHAPTER_2_OF_"UTOPIA 2184"))
>
> Commons and enclosure.
>
> A grey afternoon in England. The farmer, his goodwife, their four
> children, their diminutive pony-cart heaped with such chattels as an
> agricultural family may command in 1520. The better chattels - the pots
> and fire-irons and bedstead, and of course the pony and cart - they will
> sell at auction in the town. The pouch of shillings thus realized will
> suffice to buy lodging and food for some few weeks. After? God will
> provide, or not. Behind them, workmen from the manor house are already
> ripping thatch from gable. My lord's fence shall run here, says the
> shire-reeve, and here, and here,
>
> Commons and enclosure.
>
> Linux, though rather ad hoc, met a need. In the 1980s, Unix was an
> enclosure, propertized. Richard Stallman in Massachusetts thought he saw
> limitations in proprietary software. He and likeminded programmers
> founded the "Open Source" movement, donating to the emerging
> cybercommons first this tool, then that: they developed a text editor,
> an ANSI C compiler, a command-line interpreter, another text editor, ...
> GNU, they called their initiative, for 'GNUS's not Unix.' Witty, like
> that learned footnote ever so meticulously explaining that real number e
> is permitted, yet not required, to be the base of the natural
> logarithms. Unpack the recursion, and you get 'GNU's not Unix's not
> Unix', and then 'GNUS's not Unix's not Unix's not Unix', ad infinitum.
>
> What was lacking (or, rather, what never seemed to get finished) was a
> non-propertized kernel. A kernel: core software bringing order and good
> government to an entire workstation or server. The kernel is the
> software that coordinates.
>
> At the University of Helsinki, Linus Torvalds built a rudimentary
> kernel. Version 1.0 was completed in 1994. He named his creation Linux.
> Linux rocked, ruled. The suits liked it, started companies with names
> like Red Hat, sought to make money as consultants even while keeping the
> source code open, visible in the commons, open to continual peer review.
> A step, then, in the right direction. Of course people in the know
> sniffed at Red Hat, installed Debian GNU/Linux instead. Debian GNU/Linux
> was the Linux distro with the public charter formally forswearing
> commercial ambition. And the distro with the best formalism for finding,
> installing, monitoring, uninstalling software packages.
>
> Work on an alternative to Linux continued under the rubric 'Debian
> GNU/Hurd'. 'Hurd', it was explained in the commons, was short for 'Hird
> of Unix-Replacing Daemons', and 'Hird' short for 'Hurd of Interfaces
> Representing Depth.' 'Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons' thus itself
> expanded to 'Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth of Unix-Replacing
> Daemons', which itself expanded to 'Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons of
> Interfaces Representing Depth of Unix-Replacing Daemons', ad infinitum.
> Witty.
>
> The wider significance of the 1990s cybercommons did not escape the
> notice of social commentator Jeremy Rifkin. Here, he wrote, was a model
> for the creation of a new energy- distribution infrastructure. He
> published The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World-Wide Energy
> Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth at J.P. Tarcher/Putnam on
> 2002 September 12. Rifkin's work was rightly criticized as erring on the
> side of optimism. Nevertheless, it pointed a way forward, a tenable line
> of development, tenable even for wretched peoples reduced to hammering
> out the more basic turbine parts with hand tools.
> ((/HISTORICAL_FLASHBACK__IN_CHAPTER_2_OF_"UTOPIA 2184"))
>
> Christopher Browne's comments suggest that this flashback will have to
> be edited or rewritten, perhaps by simply cutting out the
> discussion of Hurd. It would be nice to hear from anyone with
> suggestions on appropriate points to make in a rewrite.
>
> If you need wider context, you can find
> "Utopia 2184" in its entirety in the "Literary" section of
> http://www.metascientia.com.
>
>
>
> Rapidly,
>
>
> Tom = Tom Karmo
> http://www.metascientia.com
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