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by nraynaud 4616 days ago
Yeah, and that's one of the reasons I'm a bit wary of this "open-source is magic" mantra, that's putting a lot of cooks in the burning kitchen. Open-source means community management, public relations with opiniatred people, Linus-grade emails, and if you have really a big participation but no strong leader, it ends up like GNU hurd (is it dead yet ?).

It's all about organization, and trying to have just enough people to get the work done and nobody more, and the right people, and this has nothing to do with open or closed source.
2 comments
gohrt 4616 days ago
GNU Hurd died because Linux appeared, folks like RedHat combined the GNU userspace with the Linux kernel.

It was a massive success -- everyone put in the part they did well -- kernel + userland + distribution = WIN.

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marcosdumay 4616 days ago
> folks like RedHat combined the GNU userspace with the Linux kernel

Once Linux was good enough, RMS himself set Hurd aside, put the Linux kernel into the GNU project that he started, and (almost literally) declared mission accomplished. It wasn't folks like RedHat (that only came years later), the developers of Hurd were the first to kill it.

But then, since Hurd has quite an interesting architecture, people keep developing it, like dozens of OSs out there that'll never get anywhere, but are fine with that.

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jordanthoms 4616 days ago
Making the code open source isn't going to solve all those problems - but it would make things more transparent. People both inside and outside the government would be able to see what they got for the money spent, and if things are being done in stupid ways it'd be a issue earlier.
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