to the editors:

in your otherwise excellent article on free software, you attribute the design of the gnu kernel to Richard Stallman and state that he was one of the few people in the world up to the task of developing a radically new kernel. in fact i am the principal architect and developer for that system, called the gnu hurd. (the cmu-designed system that it runs on is called mach, and was initially developed by the research team formerly headed by Rick Rashid [who was mentioned in the companion article on microsoft research], though mach is now maintained by us as part of the hurd project.)

i have been greatly assisted in this work by my excellent colleagues Roland McGrath and Miles Bader, but Richard Stallman has played essentially no role in the design or implementation of the hurd. nor is its design radically new, but instead we drew upon the ideas and work of countless others in the field of operating system design. the basic ideas behind a multi-server kernel-based system are at least twenty-five or thirty years old.

the hurd project was begun before linux was a twinkle in Linus Torvalds' eye, but because it is a more challenging task, and because we were less adept at mobilizing large-scale volunteer excitement, the linux kernel was developed and deployed much sooner. despite that, the world of free software is not a competition, and the hurd project has made initial public test releases, and work is underway as i write to make the first official public release.

thomas bushnell, bsg
cambridge, ma

in your otherwise excellent article on free software, you attribute the design of the gnu kernel to Richard Stallman and state that he was one of the few people in the world up to the task of developing a radically new kernel. in fact i am the principal architect and developer for that system, called the gnu hurd. i have been greatly assisted in this work by my excellent colleagues Roland McGrath and Miles Bader, but Richard Stallman has played essentially no role in the design or implementation of the hurd.

thomas bushnell, bsg
cambridge, ma

i apologize to thomas bushnell for misattributing the hurd to Richard Stallman. when i asked Stallman about his importance to the hurd, he said he didn't deserve the credit for it, which i misunderstood as modesty.