Sean Tilley from the Diaspora project talks about the nature of privacy on the web, and the importance and potential future of decentralized social networking.

"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..."

Sean Daly's been all around Brussels, Luxembourg, Geneva, and Barcelona getting scoops and recording events about anti-trust, OOXML, and GPLv3. It's quite a niche for a volunteer in the free software movement, so our first FSFE Fellowship interview, we ask him why and how he got into this.

«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?

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

Groklaw's Sean Daly had an opportunity to meet Vint Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, at OpenForum Europe last week. Mr. Cerf, known as the Father of the Internet because of being the co-designer with Robert Kahn of TCP/IP protocols and the basic architecture of the Internet, was gracious enough to answer some email questions Sean propounded regarding the future of the Internet, standards in general, and OOXML in particular. Like many others this week, Cerf has been giving the standards process considerable thought, and he concludes in connection with OOXML that "Internet users deserve better handling of global Internet standards."

This is Sean Daly, reporting for Groklaw, I'm in Geneva for the OpenForum Europe conference, and I'm seated here with Andy Updegrove [bio]. Thank you very much for being with us today.

"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

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.