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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

A more cynical take:

The scope of this project was ambitious when it was launched, eighteen years ago. Today, it's abundantly clear that it was too ambitious (and/or the project was poorly managed); they still don't have anything usable, whereas other projects like Tor and I2P have produced usable tools in much less time.

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Does anyone know what it’s tech stack is or whether it was architected/designed well enough to build off of? It’s a cool project but it has been running a long time

Ridiculously overcomplicated, and almost entirely unique to GNUnet:

https://gnunet.org/en/architecture.html

My uncharitable guess would be that most of it is completely unusable outside the context of this project.

It might look complicated at first, but the parts seem reasonable too me. It might be simpler to understand when the building blocks are grouped and larger components only show top level (grouped) dependencies instead of the full graph.

I just needed one peek at that crazy diagram to agree with your point.

ReactOS has been in development since 1996. Hurd since 1990. Some things take time.

ReactOS is entirely usable, if niche. GNUnet isn't usable. The home page describes it as "not ready for usage beyond developers", "still only suitable for early adopters with some reasonable pain tolerance", and "unlikely to provide good anonymity" -- it's unfit for purpose.

Hurd is an abject, embarrassing failure. Individual developers have produced more stable, complete operating systems as a joke (like PonyOS) than the entire GNU project has managed in 29 years.

Emacs is also a more complete operating system.

To be fair, Hurd was also a joke... in the end.

Does contributing to Linux not count? Some things are hard and ultimately fail. It's impossible to have any success without toleration of the possibility of failing.

Some of the GNU userspace projects surrounding Hurd have become important parts of the Linux userspace. Hurd itself, however, is wildly different from the Linux kernel, and has had little to no influence on Linux.

I think they should have backed out of it a little bit earlier. Being able to recognize your own failing might be as important as success.

Well, you have to fail anyway, so failing quicker might save you some time and get you to a good solution quicker as well. Understanding that should be a core part of any HNer at least. Probably wouldn't hurd the free software world either. (pun intentended)

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