GNU Hurd 0.5, GNU Mach 1.4, GNU MIG 1.4 Released

jrepin writes "Which day could be better suited for publishing a set of Hurd package releases than the GNU project's 30th birthday? These new releases bundle bug fixes and enhancements done since the last releases more than a decade ago; really too many (both years and improvements) to list them individually, The GNU Hurd is the GNU project's replacement for the Unix kernel. It is a collection of servers that run on the Mach microkernel to implement file systems, network protocols, file access control, and other features that are implemented by the Unix kernel or similar kernels (such as Linux)."

Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0

[MrEricSir]

GNU is 30 years old, but Hurd is "only" 23. It started while the first Bush was still president rather than Reagan.

Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0

[iggymanz]

wrong. the initial failed attempt at HURD started in 1986 with a BSD 4.4 like kernel. The project is thus 27 years old. still not stable, not suitable for any production use, and only runs on i386, it is a failure

Re:Proposal:

[Anonymous Coward]

Fork a BSD variant, license it under the GPL, package it with GNU stuff, call it Hurd 1.0.

Just in case you (or anyone else who reads this) is really so ignorant of copyright law, it should be said that forking code that isn't your own does not suddenly turn you from a licensee into a licensor. You can't take a BSD operating system, remove the BSD license, and attach the GPL for at least two reasons: 1) the BSD license forbids distributing sources (or binaries) without a copy of the license (which is the BSD license itself), and 2) you are not the copyright owner of any part of the BSD operating system you took, so you simply have no authority to (re)license it. You are automatically the copyright owner of whatever you create, including any patches or additions to the BSD operating system, and you can license your own stuff however you wish -- you can even distribute your own stuff alongside the BSD operating system using whatever terms you like for your own stuff which isn't necessarily allowed by the GPL because liberal licenses are awesome like that -- but you certainly never have any right to relicense anything that isn't yours.

Re:I might not be here for Hurd 1.0

[fatphil]

The funny thing is that for some kernels, it's perfectly true. I know the kernel I run on this workstation here gives about 99.5% of the cycles to the userspace programs that I launch. Yet playing very briefly with a windows 8 system a few months back (it survived about 20 minutes between arrival at the office and having linux put on it), the kernel and hundreds of intimately-bound-I-don't-know-what-the-fuck-they-do-or-why-I-would-ever-want-them daemons were taking up between 5% and 10% of the CPU constantly. The former I would happily accept a 50% increase in overhead to, I'm perfectly happy only having 99.25% to myself. But the latter would have ground to a halt if there were any more impediments to interprocess communication.