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.
So what’s the difference between this kernel and the Linux kernel? Are they both intended to be interface-equivalent (even if they aren’t in the same place on the implementation side)? Any fundamentally different design policies?
“You can now use Debian without Linux” is a misleading headline: should read “A small but growing number of experts can now use Debian without Linux.” Most of “us” probably cannot.
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!
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.
Except they didn’t relicence to AGPL initially, they switched to dual licensing under the RSALv2 (a proprietary licence) and SSPLv1 (a non open source, non-free licence). So essentially they made it proprietary, that’s what everyone was annoyed about. If they went straight to AGPL I’m sure there would’ve been some people who were annoyed, but most developers would understand why and I doubt there would have been the valkey fork.
I realize I oversimplified a complex set of moves and “shared source” is its own can of worms. My post was already too long.
But my core point is that the code (as Valkey) remained available and remains available under the same free software license that it has always been available under.
The only consequence of what Redis did was that they stopped giving away their “new” code to service providers like Amazon. Even Amazon can continue to use what was there before. And the community can continue to collaborate on the same code base that they were collaborating on before. The licence Redis chooses for its “new” code is largely irrelevant.
We talk about permissive licenses like they represent some massive risk. I just do not see it that way. And they have many advantages including often attracting more corporate participation (more free code for me).
I am a very happy user of Clang/LLVM. It is the product of collaboration between Google, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, academia, and other nerds. I am very happy we have licenses that encourage companies to create quality software for me to use.
I am sure Redis chose BSD to begin with in case they ever had to make a move like they did. If the only option was GPL, they may never have released it as Open Source to begin with. Again, I am glad they did.
The difference with llvm is that nobody is selling a hosted llvm as a service, nobody is making money off llvm without contributing back (directly, I know a bunch of companies use llvm to make a product that makes money).
Redis clearly thinks that using the BSD licence was a mistake. I agree with you, using BSD attracted more people/companies to use it than if they had chosen AGPL, that’s the trade-off you make when choosing a copyleft licence.
I think I agree with you on a lot of this, let me know if this is a fair summary of your argument:
Permissive and copyleft licences both have advantages and disadvantages, if a project chooses a permissive licence then that’s their choice, and if they later decide to re-license then the project will probably get forked and carry on under the original licence, so as a user you can just switch to the fork and the only thing that will is the name of the package you install.
That seems pretty reasonable to me, let me know if I made any mistakes summarising your point.
The caveat I would add to that is that the project shouldn’t complain about freeloaders if they choose a licence that explicitly allows freeloading. They chose a permissive licence for its advantages but they won’t accept the consequences that come with that decision.
You summarized my position very well. Thank you.
Didn’t debian already offer a hurd image many years ago? I could be wrong but i thought i heard (or hurd hah) someone mention it in a video recently. I think it was on old guix video from dt (i decided to try and write a guix config so i was watching some guix content).
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.
With systemd? AFAIK, it’s a hard dependency this days.
nitrux doesnt use it afaik
