I’m interested in finding out what people think when they see something GNU. What do you associate with it? Do you tend to be more or less interested in the project if.it is GNU or not? What is your perspective?
I’m interested in finding out what people think when they see something GNU. What do you associate with it? Do you tend to be more or less interested in the project if.it is GNU or not? What is your perspective?
I generally think of GNU as being foundational (or, old) and principled.
I really appreciate the contributions they’ve made to both core utilities and especially philosophy.
But I don’t see them as lighting up the world or adding anything new lately. I think of vaporware like Hurd with 1000 year dev cycles. I think of them recommending Linux distributions like Trisquel that let perfect be the enemy of pretty good.
To be fair, Hurd recently made a decent splash. And strictly speaking, it’s troubles weren’t specifically GNU. Without all the legal quagmire around BSD we would all be on it. Linux would just be some niche hobby project just like Hurd. It was unfortunately a victim of timing. Both in that sense and the direction computing took in the future. Heavy IPC across multiple discrete CPU cores is a bad idea for performance. It works but it’s slooooow