OT: Can We Make OSes Reliable and Secure

[Evan Leibovitch]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> Then what took Hurd so long?
>   
The problem with Hurd's pace of development is not inherent in its design.

As everyone knows, the GNU project significantly predates the spat
between Torvalds and Tannenbaum. The difference in the speed of
development and popularity between Linux and Hurd (and arguably BSD too)
likely has more to do with community rather than technology.

While the FSF and its aims are well-supported, most of its support has
been passive rather than active. This is IMO because the GNU Project
(well, Stallman for sure) has never really grasped the community
development process that Eric Raymond tagged "the bazaar". I've always
maintained that Linus' talent at herding cats was always more important
to the growth of Linux than his talents as a coder. Smaller projects
that can be maintained by single people or small groups do fine under
the GNU umbrella, but their communities don't scale well. Hurd is just
one example; GNU Enterprise is another one that languishes.

The few GNU projects that have migrated to a broad community development
scheme (ie, gcc) needed a mutiny/fork in order to do so. Unfortunately,
for whatever reasons there's not enough interest in Hurd for such a
migration and revitalization to happen there. Yet.

- Evan
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