«Hurd having been in development for so long, but still not production-ready; and with Linux as a mature free kernel being firmly established as the de-facto standard kernel for the GNU system -- people often wonder: why haven't developers abandoned the Hurd long ago?

So what is the state of the Hurd? Is it vaporware, like Duke Nukem Forever? Fortunately not: the code exists, there is still work going on (for instance as part of Google Summer of Code), and there are even some relatively functional Hurd distributions. Let's look first at the code and the current architecture, and then at the Hurd distributions.

"A Dutch university has landed a European Research Council grant to continue work on a Unix-type operating system that aims to be more reliable and secure than GNU/Linux or Microsoft Windows..." -- see also The GNU Hurd project

Armijn Hemel (gpl-violtions.org, Loohuis Consulting) and Shane Coughlan (Opendawn, FSFE) complete a trilogy of articles examining FOSS licensing issues and best practice on LWN.net with an outline of FOSS license compliance for companies.

* «With the Hurd, users can change anything in their system which doesn't affect other users.»

"GNU Hurd (usually referred to as the Hurd) is a free software computer operating system kernel, released under the GNU General Public License. It has been under development since 1990 by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. It consists of a set of servers (or daemons, in Unix terminology) that work on top of a microkernel; together they form the kernel of GNU. The Hurd aims to surpass Unix kernels in functionality, security, and stability, while remaining largely compatible with them..."

A month of the Hurd: Arch Hurd, updated Debian GNU/Hurd QEMU image, and GSoC students.

The HURD was meant to be the true kernel at the heart of the GNU operating system. The promise behind the HURD was revolutionary – a set of daemons on top of a microkernel that was intended to surpass the performance of the monolithic kernels of traditional Unix systems and in doing so, give greater security, freedom and flexibility to the users – but it has yet to come down to earth.

"...There is read-only access for everyone and read-write access for people that are registered with the Hurd Savannah group..." --
* git repo: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=hurd/wiki.git
* web-commits: http://www.bddebian.com/~wiki/