Re: Future Direction of GNU Hurd?

[William ML Leslie]

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

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