Re: about GNU Hurd

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

       I would like to request yet again that we stick with Mach, or ditch
       the Hurd completely and use Linux.

   That kind of emotional appeal is not the right basis for making a
   purely technical choice like this, when there are serious technical
   problems to be dealt with.  Mach seems to be inadequate for making
   something that would be much better than Linux, but that doesn't mean
   we have to give up on the Hurd completely.

It is not an emotional appeal, far from it, it is a purley realistic,
and logical conclusion.  Linux is moving more and more towards a very
hybrid kernel, that is looking more and more like a microkernel.  It
already does several things that we already do, user level file
systems and drivers for example.  It already does several things that
we would like in GNU/Hurd as well, USB support, sound, petabyte
support for filesystems, ext3, ..., the list goes on.  We would have
to rewrite all of this to have it work well under GNU.  We could tweak
GNU/Linux to work exactly like GNU works today without much effort.

Doing so we would also get a plethora of hardware drivers which is the
single most important thing when it comes to an free operating system
today, we already have all the important programs written, but new
hardware pops up each week with secret specifications.