The GNU project was started in 1983 and in 2025 you can finally use a pure GNU operating system. Not that you’d want to but that is some serious perseverance.
Minimal requirements for Linux: Linux Kernal (optional)
Some time ago (one or two years, i am not sure) i had the Hurd running on an old Thinkpad and used it as a daily driver for a couple of months. It…worked. Most of the times.
The thing is: Its a really interesting system that - in a different timeline - would have made up a GREAT operating system if it would have come forward and evolved a lot faster. Even without the lack of a
browserthe bloated VM we nowadays call a browser (you can absolutely run Dillo on it) it just hurts a bit too much to use it for more than resarch / hobbyist / hacking purposes.I do not know how that article covered so much background on GNU hURD and the quest for a micro-kernel UNIX without mentioning Redox OS.
Redox is also micro-kernel based POSIX compatible operating system (UNIX compatible). So quite like the GNU project and HURD in that sense.
Redox is younger, 10 years old instead of 30, and more “modern” (eg. written in Rust). It can be seen as a GNU competitor as it does not rely on the GNU C library or utilities.
mit license though. ripe for getting the redis treatment
First, there has been massive amounts of MIT code in important parts of the Linux ecosystem for decades. Xorg, Wayland, and Mesa for starters. The sky has not fallen. I am not exactly panicking.
But let’s address your specific example.
Let start by pointing out that Redis was BSD, not MIT. But let’s assume your cautionary tale applies.
A truly gigantic corporation, Amazon, was making all the money off Redis without giving anything back to the company that actually wrote the code (Redis). So, Redis tried to change the license to make that more difficult. The license they chose is the strictest free software license the FSF offers—the AGPL.
Pop quiz: what part of the above are we “the community” outraged about? The clearly predatory Amazon stuff? Or the defensive action by the company writing all the code? That’s right, we are mad at the company that gave us all the code for free and that still licenses it AGPL.
But even beyond that, what was lost again? Because the implication is that BSD (or MIT) somehow allows companies to “take” free software from us. This is false.
What happened with Redis is that the original code remained 100% available. And it remained part of a 100% free software project. It remains 100% BSD licensed to this day. You can use it, you can study it, you can improve it, you can share it, and you can even sell it commercially! It offers you at least FIVE freedoms.
https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey
Not a single line of code was lost from the project. Yes, the project had to change its name (Redis owns the name Redis). Yes, Redis stopped contributing to the project. Is that not their right?
It is that last bit that seems to drive us mad. We yell about corporations taking our code. But all the examples of bad behaviour we give boil down to them choosing to give us less of theirs.
If “the community” is the one writing the code, nobody can take it from us. And even if big evil companies are writing the code, the only code that they can deny us is code they write in the future.
I find it hard to be either outraged or even particularly afraid of that.
Anyway, I do not want to talk you out of your license preferences. I have no beef with that. But I do wish there was less FUD slinging at projects that choose to license their hard work as MIT.
Fun fact, there isnt even an “MIT license”, look:
Next level gaslighting. “Is the MIT license in the room with us right now?”
I took this in the spirit that there isn’t a single MIT license, so you’re correct, but more gooder would’ve been to mention the specific variant that was in use by the project
I mean that there is MIT and MIT-0 is already odd
testregex is an absolutely wild suffix
Did you even read the page you linked? It took less than 10 seconds to scroll down to the 'M’s.
Yes.
There are many variants. Also APL2.0 is just as permissive but protects against patent trolling
BTW Guix+Hurd, a fully GNU OS, has been around for quite a while now: https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2020/a-hello-world-virtual-machine-running-the-hurd. You can even run it on real hardware: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2024/hurd-on-thinkpad/
I learned about this via Guix but didn’t notice that. Nice!
With systemd? AFAIK, it’s a hard dependency this days.
nitrux doesnt use it afaik
No it’s not. You can install sysvinit on Debian which removes systemd automatically. There are a couple other steps but it’s a 5 minute process.
How can I find out if it supports ext4? if it does I might install it tonight. I have been waiting for Hurd for over a decade.
Just FYI: Everything Hurd set out to do which Linux couldn’t has by now been implemented in Linux.
Such as?
Portability to different architectures, filesystem in userspace, and updating the kernel without rebooting are the major ones.
You can patch the kernel live? I know that Ubuntu does that
Red Hat does it, too.
But it’s a paid enterprise feature.
