Okay the title is a very lame pun. But in this post I’d like to argument a bit more my reasons for not liking the Hurd project, at least in the way it is still being developed nowadays, which I announced on Identi.ca yesterday. This might sound quite strange coming from the guy who dedicated time and soul to Gentoo/FreeBSD.
First of all let’s put into context what Hurd is nowadays: it is not something viable, or usable. Twenty (20!) years after its original inception, Hurd is still nothing that you’d think of using on your desktop, or your server — nor should you, I guess. The class of operating system this belongs to is the same as Gentoo/FreeBSD, Debian’s GNU/kFreeBSD , Haiku, Plan9 and so on, a toy project. Or if you want to make it sound less childish, a research project, but I prefer the shorter version.
But while there are so many toy projects operating systems, I’m singling out Hurd, and there two main reasons for my feeling; they can be considered mostly personal, non-technical opinion, but I’ll stand by them.
First of all, most other toy systems have given us steady improvements in different areas; take Plan9 for instance: ten years older than Hurd, but recently Linux gained access to paravirtualized filesystems, based on what? On the Plan9 protocols. Good research going — even though it does seem tremendously silly when you look into it for the first time. And even though I was sceptic the first time I looked into it, GNU/kFreeBSD has probably made glibc a bit more … malleable.
But most importantly is that the whole Hurd project at the moment does not have any real technical reason to exist, it only has one huge symbolic value for the GNU project, beginning with the idea that “Linux is not the Free operating system”.. which I could accept if it wasn’t coming from the project sponsored by FSF. The same FSF that insists that you should not use any proprietary operating system, that you should only and always use Free software and so on so forth.
Is Hurd the example of Free Software people should use? Do they insist on their argument even when it is totally, technically, unsound? I’m afraid some of the people in the FSF do. Luckily, FSF is not just those, and there are numbers of reasonable, hard-working and capable people. Which is why even I have signed copyright assignments to FSF with a bit of rant attached), and why I try to contribute to GnuPG when I can (given I use it).
Once again, though, what’s the problem if a bunch of elitist developers feel like working on a toy system? It really isn’t something new; heck Plan9 is, as far as I can tell, mostly developed for that. With a few difference: most of the people I saw involved with Plan9 are also involved in the suckless projects (and I rarely, if at all, agree with the premises of such projects), and they definitely are not very interested in making more users for any software at all, so their approach is well suited to their goals, not so for the GNU people, but oh well.
The problem I have, with actually any toy project, is with the people who keep insisting to find philosophical reasons to show others why their project is really, very, so much important. It happens (awfully often on Identi.ca) with both Plan9 but, more often lately, with Hurd. And when I do show my disagreement, I usually end up flooded with defences of said projects (“they don’t bother you”, “everybody should keep using what they prefer”, … sure of course — then why can’t I voice my personal opinion?).
This brings me with categorizing most of the people involved in toy project (or actually, any project — with mainstream projects it is a bit more shady to go from one category to the other) in three categories: the silent doers, the vocal doers, and the advocates.
For the silent doers, those who know they are working on a toy project and have no expectancy for people to consider it “important for the greater good”, I have fondness: you go with it and try to get something good out of it — I have done something like that with G/FreeBSD: Gentoo has had libarchive (bsdtar) from way before it went mainstream as a dependency of GNOME and KDE.
I’m a bit more polemic with the vocal doers: sure, you’re entitled to advertise your choice, no way I’m going to argue against it; but I’ll also not refrain from stating my disagreement. That shouldn’t be a problem, no? And I’m sorry, but I’m also not going to generally be convinced by your reasons to keep developing. It’s not a lack of respect, and I’m sorry if you feel this way, but… I don’t really care. If you want to show me something, show me technical reason why your work could be important to me, or to others, but technical.
But please, spare me the advocates. They talk just too much (after a passing reference to Hurd I get three, continued messages, trying to argue for it? I’m going to be a bit disappointed — I reply and I get another three? I’m seriously cranky), and of the wrong arguments. I really don’t care about the philosophy of a subproject. I subscribe to the basic philosophy of Free and Open Source Software, and I maintain that it can be technically superior if the project accepts that proprietary software can (and usually enough does) have better technical aspects. Survival of the fittest, for me, is happening only in technical terms.
Clear enough now?