2006/10/28, Devdas Bhagat devdas@dvb.homelinux.org:
So why won't the FSF finish off the HURD and get a proper GNU OS out under the GPLv3? Because Linux is *NOT* a GNU project.
We started GNU project to create a complete Free Operating System. We now have such a Free Operating System with important contribution from Linus Torvalds and we want to give credit to his work we call it GNU/Linux (Linux based GNU system, GNU plus Linux)
Once we had Linux available as Free Software our main aim is achieved (to give users freedom) and the reason why we didn't stop Hurd because it is designed to be better than Unix.But since we already achieved our main goal (a Free Operating System that respects its users and help them live an ethical life), the technical merits are only less important than Freedom. So we give less priority to Hurd and give more priority to fight new threats to users Freedom like DRM and Software patents ( so GPLv3 is more important to us than Hurd).
But if you are interested in the technical merits like flexibility for its users, more power to the administrators, security of the system and much more from the micro kernel design
( Read what Andrew Tanenbaum thinks about these http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/reliable-os/ )
Join with the GNU Hurd hackers and help us finish it.
You can try how it works. http://lily.nipl.net:4444/ you can get a shell account to the GNU system and see it for yourself what all cool new features it offers.
Or try a live CD from http://superunprivileged.org/
Or you can get some guidelines from http://hurd.in/bin/view/Hurd/HOWTOs
I promise, I will call it GNU/HURD.
Sure. We will call it just GNU :-)
Cheers Praveen A