At this point? None. It's a silly exercise on not going anywhere.

HURD uses Mach, which is a mid-90s academic microkernel that's not so good in practice. Particularly, it's so slow at IPC (which is critical to performance in a pure microkernel system) that those using it (Darwin/OSX/IOS, HURD) had to compromise and use a hybrid architecture: Running drivers and some other components of the system with kernel privileges; A popular design choice in the 90s (also BeOS, Windows NT) due to the immaturity of microkernels.

In late 90s/early 2000s, L4 happened. It went to great lengths to actually make achieving performance with a pure microkernel architecture possible. Afterwards, there were a lot of followup microkernels implementing the L4 interface, so these days when we say L4 we generally mean the interface, or any microkernel that implements it.

The HURD was watching, and sometime early 2000s they realized that the hybrid architecture was dead and they needed to move on if they wanted to stay relevant. There was a serious attempt at porting HURD to L4. It was already working, but the people behind it became disillusioned with the HURD, after realizing flaws on the architecture. I recommend reading the papers the L4 port people wrote on this. Back then, there were some ten to twenty HURD developers active.

After that, the HURD should have rethought its architecture and moved on with L4. Instead, they didn't continue the L4 effort nor fix the architecture. What they did was abandon it and start an entirely new port to a different microkernel, Coyotos, which didn't bear fruit, either. Throughout all this, the HURD was losing developers as they became disinterested.

Fast forward to 2005, Andrew Tanenbaum and his students released the first version (a mere skeleton, without even virtual memory support) of Minix3, and continued working from there http://wiki.minix3.org/MinixReleases , going a long way and bringing us to its current state. Right now, Minix3 has 20-30 active developers any given day, a few of which are working on it full-time, supported by funds coming from European Union research programs, as the reliability aspect http://www.minix3.org/other/reliability.html to Minix3 has been deemed important.

Meanwhile, the HURD has 0-3 active developers depending on the day, none of which working full time, and with no roadmap or organization whatsoever. Last I've heard, they introduced userspace driver support, which is a step in the right direction, but a bit silly as the real problem (they're still using Mach) is yet to be solved.

Minix3 next version, 3.3.0, is weeks away. Here's some insider info: It breaks ABI to adopt NetBSD types, skyrocketing compatibility with pkgsrc software. The system will for the first time be built dynamic, as mmap() is finally working and the dynamic library support has been adapted to actually do shared libraries using it.

As lack of proper dynamic library support was holding back X (which already ran, but with barely any software for it), I expect we'll have a lot of WMs, DEs and GUI programs from here on, and interest will pick up.

If you ask me about the HURD, I'd say it's not worth continuing. Just take along whatever salvageable ideas and concepts and move on. Working on a system that isn't at a dead end is one suggestion. Escape https://github.com/Nils-TUD/Escape , HelenOS and Minix3 are three such systems. Genode is not exactly a system but it is interesting in its own way, and Plan9Front http://ninetimes.cat-v.org/ is very interesting even though it is not currently a pure microkernel system (it can be made so without breaking anything thanks to the awesome design). All these systems I suggested are Free Software, interesting, promising and actually active.

> Google+ embodied the Internet's cardinal sin: It broke everything it touched

I think this is the most important single line of the piece. G+ was pretty broken from the get go despite some promising ideas. But instead of focusing around what was working, Google simply amplified all the broken garbage -- then spread it around everywhere, making everything toxic, cancerous.

It's one of those many weird cases where you sit there, hands on your desk, mouth agape looking at some Google property that was fucked over by the G+ project and just ask yourself "doesn't anybody at Google use this garbage?". Because the issues are so immediate and so obvious, it's impossible that nobody raised some red flags.

Which leaves two possibilities:

- Google is composed of such inept socially awkward people that no red flags were raised and they all just proceeded on course doo dee doo doo dee (a scenario I find very hard to believe)

- Red flags were raised and simply brushed aside.

The first scenario is hard to believe because it presumes mass and gross incompetence on behalf of most of the employees at Google. But I know googlers, I've been interviews by Google, I've had various interactions with people from Google, and most of them just seem like normal folks from a variety of backgrounds.

As more and more leaks out it sounds like the second scenario is where it's at, and the question is why? Was it just some dumb headed attempt to extract any money possible for the major shareholders by turning the brand into garbage? Or was it just an honest attempt at unifying the properties, just managed at an absolutely amateurish level?

It's all so senseless and stupid and now everything is broken.

The sad thing is, this is something I see all the time, one hopelessly broken pet project is carried by the good idea fairy to some senior manager, and they being a cascade of failures across the rest of the company on something they probably have convinced themselves is just a big gamble with lots of upside. By the time the damage is done and widely recognized, the exec is out the door on their golden parachute leaving the remaining veterans to pick up the pieces and unfuck things. Except in this case, the ultimate party responsible holds half of the majority voting rights and continues to blissfully push socially inept product ideas. The only remediation is a long unfucking process and some possible minor impact on share price, meaning he can only buy 2 300' yachts instead of 2 350' yachts.

I don't get it. So Brin announces to the world that Google+ is the new sliced bread in 2011. Then he tells a small group of people that he thinks he personally should not have been involved with G+. Also the leader of the G+ project leaves (one month after the project started? One month after Brin had his candid talk recently?)

Where in this is the broken trust? What is the author actually upset about? Seems to me like in 2011 Brin and co. thought Google+ was the future. Now Brin simply is admitting that he personally might not have been the right person to take this on and perhaps it was a bad idea (not clear from the poorly written article). On top of that the author is trying to make a story out of the project leader leaving precisely because there was no story there.

I think this piece is terribly written and there is no story behind it. G+ is not my favorite product but I think this is just an outburst of anger that does not deserve our attention.

Please don't give interviewers any ideas.