GNU turns 40: Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time, but hey, there's cake
- Reference: 1695225852
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/09/20/gnu_turns_40/
- Source link:
That day in 1983, the eternally controversial [1]Richard Stallman announced his project to create a new operating system, recursively named GNU's Not Unix. This year, the Free Software Foundation is [2]celebrating this as the project's anniversary, and there will be two special events – a [3]"hackday" at the FSF HQ in Boston, Massachusetts, and also a [4]celebration and hacker meeting in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland.
It is arguable that in the sort of narrow, specific sense that Stallman himself tends to favor, the GNU Project failed. There isn't a complete, working GNU OS. An operating system is a stack of components, from the visible user-facing stuff to the kernel, and the GNU kernel, the also recursively named [5]Hurd , is still incomplete and not ready for daily use, even after all this time.
[6]
It is a very ambitious design, a true microkernel, and very few projects have managed to get that to work well. The state of the art has arguably moved on from the Mach microkernel that Hurd uses to projects such as as seL4, as [7]we discussed last year . A more successful example – but also still rather incomplete – is Minix 3, which runs the [8]management engine inside all modern Intel chips .
[9]
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Before it chose to go it alone and develop Hurd, the GNU Project nearly chose the BSD kernel, as Hurd developer Thomas Bushnell [11]describes :
My first choice was to take the BSD 4.4-Lite release and make a kernel. I knew the code, I knew how to do it. It is now perfectly obvious to me that this would have succeeded splendidly and the world would be a very different place today.
This was all way before Linux; we're talking 1991 or so.
[12]Ubuntu's 'Mantic Minotaur' peeks out of the labyrinth
[13]These days you can teach old tech a bunch of new tricks
[14]Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 hits beta with reassuringly little drama
[15]Linux 6.6's in-kernel SMB networking server graduates
To be more fair and balanced, though, the GNU Project has been a massive success which has changed the shape of the entire computer industry. On one, low level, there are multiple [16]GNU OSes based around the Linux kernel, including the NixOS-like [17]GNU Guix (it's pronounced "geeks", apparently), as well as several [18]all-GNU-code distros .
But in the more general sense, the concepts of software freedom that Stallman formalized and promoted have turned the software industry upside down. Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens found a way to sell the idea to business people with the term "open source," on which The Reg is hosted, and which we've been promoting [19]since the 20th century .
As we write, The Reg FOSS Desk is at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao, where thousands of both beardy types and others in expensive suits are meeting and mingling to discuss developing and using software and hardware in the open, with source code that is not only available, but also can be modified and indeed forked, while being protected by software licenses that formalize the notions of public ownership that Stallman created.
[20]
Stallman himself remains an influential presence in the Free Software movement. Although he resigned from the Free Software Foundation in 2019, doing [21]an interview with The Register before he left, he later and [22]not very quietly returned in 2021. ®
Get our [23]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/Richard%20Stallman/
[2] https://www.fsf.org/news/forty-years-of-gnu-and-the-free-software-movement
[3] https://www.fsf.org/events/gnu40
[4] https://www.gnu.org/gnu40/gnu40.en.html
[5] https://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZQtrhZvfLSyJDQIXBpKP3wAAAgU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/17/google_kata_os/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2017/12/06/intel_management_engine_pwned_by_buffer_overflow/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZQtrhZvfLSyJDQIXBpKP3wAAAgU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZQtrhZvfLSyJDQIXBpKP3wAAAgU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050727225542530
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/19/ubuntu_2310_taking_shape/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/14/pc_xt_with_hdmi/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/13/linux_mint_debian_edition_hands_on/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/11/linux_6_6_ksmbd/
[16] https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.en.html
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2016/08/04/gnu_guix_emits_next_beta/
[18] https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.en.html
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2000/05/15/shame_on_the_registers_support/
[20] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/applications&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZQtrhZvfLSyJDQIXBpKP3wAAAgU&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/17/richard_stallman_final_interview/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/22/richard_stallman_back_on_fsf_board/
[23] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
"This was all way before Linux; we're talking 1991 or so."
Ummm.... Wasn't Linux released in September 1991?
1991
Yup, Linus announced it in August 1991 and version 0.01 came out the following month.
The guy quoted might have meant earlier in the year, or might be misremembering.
C.
Re: 1991
Or maybe he meant that, since they'd be borrowing from a far more complete kernel, they would have leapfrogged early Linux. Linux 0.01 barely qualifies as functional in that it booted up... and not a whole lot else. If we imagine an alternate universe where Linus took, for example, the Minix kernel and just sort of hacked it up to do things like use 386 protected memory functions, version 0.01 would probably have looked very different.
Re: 1991
Exactly -- Linux was just a cool toy in its first release.
Re: 1991
And has been on a downwards trajectory ever since.
While the cake is a lie...
...the benefits of having massive amounts coders focused on making enough free code to drive the entire world should not be dismissed.
A Complicated Man
RMS may be a dick and a generally unpleasant human being, being the OG "neckbeard", but there is no denying that he managed to have a pretty significant impact on the software world. Without him there'd be no Eric Raymond to basically put Stallman's ideas into a form that was easier for people to understand, and also not be such a hard ass about everything so that the idea of open source could take hold. There's also his work with Emacs, which may be a niche program, but has had an outsized impact.
Re: A Complicated Man
Just for the record, I've never found rms to be a pain to deal with. He's actually quite easy to work with ... as long as you don't expect him to change to fit into your image of what he should be.
> Stallman's baby still not ready for prime time
Actually; upon reflection, it kinda is "ready". Think back to the situation then. If we didn't have Linux and BSD was still faffing with licensing, we would have absolutely jumped onto GNU/Hurd as it currently is now. It isn't missing too much that render it a non-starter.
So really, it is great to know that we have BSD and Hurd ready to pick up the slack if Linux ever did have the possibility to become problematic.
You hit the nail, sort of...
...Because each of these software and technology stacks have features that make them slightly superior to their peers. They also have features that make them less than ideal for some use cases. In my opinion this is where GNU and FLOSS shine: We must chose the right tool for the job. Sometimes that means forgoing FLOSS entirely and going with Windows as the desktop and Oracle (shudder) as the database. GNU didn't just create a supply chain, but it also created a production chain so we could build the tools we need when we need them. That way we could invent new tools to make our other tools more useful.
Minix 3
El Reg said: "A more successful example – but also still rather incomplete – is Minix 3 ..."
The public server for Minix 3 has been more or less dead since 2016 or 2017 and no apparent development since then. There has been talk by verious people about reviving it, but it doesn't seem to come to much.
RMS contribution
I haven't really even talked to RMS since the late 1980s, when he was bopping around CMU getting misled by the Mach 3.X people about how efficient their microkernel architecture was: Sys calls were really slow, but once you mapped a file, reading the next byte was fast, so they'd tell you how fast 'getc' was, since it was basically *data_pointer++; in reality, everything else was slow. IIRC they also convinced IBM to structure (a version of?) OS/2 around the same micro-kernel principles, with the result that we all know.
But despite Hurd never coming to fruition, everything else he did, including inspiring the entire Free Software movement, has been a massive success, well beyond what I, or probably anyone else who knew him back in the 1970s, could have believed possible.
My vague recollection from the late 1970s, was that he hated AT&T for refusing to make Unix(TM) free, and he decided that in retaliation, he was going to rewrite everything they did and give it away. I mean, it was obviously ridiculous -- he's just some guy (TM), and AT&T was The Death Star.
But looking back, of course, he actually did it. Linux provided the OS, of course, but the compilers, editors, and more tools than I can count all came from GNU/FSF, and no small number of them were written by RMS himself. I've known my share of awesome programmers in my day, but i can't think of anyone who cranked out as much well designed, if poorly documented, code, than RMS. Not even close. The Free Software model has taken over the world, leaving AT&T in the dust, and even convincing Microsoft to join rather than fight.
So, let's all raise a cold one in Stallman's honor.
Re: RMS contribution
"So, let's all raise a cold one in Stallman's honor."
I met RMS in Brazil in a security conference around the 2000's - he was ok. Good ideas on buying Loongson hardware from China, reading emails only from the terminal, and fucking with USA intel agencies.
Drinking one for him.
It's difficult to verbalise the scale of effect that GNU and free software ideas have had on the software industry over the last 40 years. More power to GNU and the FSF in the future.