Quote:
Originally Posted by sacerdos_daemonis
I find it interesting that after all these years, his dreamed of GNU OS is still nowhere near to becoming a reality. The closest GNU has gotten is the recently released Gnusense, which is just, as far as I know, a Libre Debian. They created the user applications a long time ago, but the kernel is still being created? Interesting. But then, I have not thoroughly researched the developments. So I do not know how many factors I am unaware or.
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The Hurd is not really his focus or concern, at least not these days:
From his recent slashdot Q and A:
"The GNU Hurd kernel (and the GNU/Hurd system, which is GNU/Linux with the Hurd instead of Linux) is not a high priority for us any more, because it would be a replacement for the free parts of Linux, and we don't need to replace those. Volunteers continue to work on the Hurd, because it is an interesting technical project.
The parts of Linux we need to replace are the nonfree parts, the "binary blobs". But replacing those has nothing to do with the GNU Hurd. The main work necessary to replace the blobs is reverse engineering to determine the specs of the peripherals those blobs are used in."
Whether he feels some kind of private wistfullness to see a GNU kernel replace Linux is anyone's guess, but publicly there's no evidence that that is his "dream" if it ever was. He makes few public statements "dreaming" about particular GNU technical roadmaps. I've seen posts of his on mailing lists recently where he seems to care a little about guile, e.g. in a recent guilemacs thread on emacs-devel he confirmed that he still considers guile scheme the official GNU extension language and encourages its use in emacs. Plus he expressed approval for Ludovic Courtes's efforts with guile to write guix, saying it looked cool or something like that. As far as I can tell (and I only occasionally watch Hurd mailing lists) he's not paying any attention whatsoever to the Hurd.
As far as there being a GNU operating system, in his words above and in other places, you can see that he considers that done, with Linux as the kernel, except where there are proprietary parts mixed in. So, yes, there's gnusense that FSF sponsors and some other "pure" distros FSF vouches for as meeting all their criteria. But this is only one of many FSF campaigns you see on their website, not their main purpose. There are a handful of GNU developers, aside from Hurd people, who seem interested in making a linux distro named Guix, but it sounds like an individual pet project, not something brought about top down from FSF or rms. In fact, whether it's desirable or important to have an official GNU run linux distro seems to be a matter of debate among FSF people.
The only places rms seems to me to care overly much whether people use GNU vs. competing free software is...
1. that one GNU project encourage use of other GNU projects (I can't think of an example off the top of my head, but I think I've seen this). I'd guess the motivation here is related to #2 below.
2. when the competing free software has a license that allows proprietary extensions, particularly where he sees real tactical advantage (in his effort to have all software under free licenses) being weakened. He's bothered quite a bit right now by the growing popularity of llvm vis a vis gcc, for instance, since he's claimed to see gcc's licensing terms push large companies to release software and feels that with llvm they wouldn't bother to send out their patches, and that more users would end up with a proprietary compiler.