Breaking News: GNU/Hurd 1.0 Released!

Fake News written by James Baughn on

from the miracles-do-happen dept.

HURDLAND, MISSOURI -- In what some are calling the most shocking development since the invention of fire, Richard M. Stallman today unveiled the first official release of the GNU Project's operating system kernel, GNU/Hurd 1.0.0.

How was GNU able to produce the new operating system so quickly? Simple. They used GNU Emacs as the base.

"We were going to develop our own microkernal-based system from scratch," RMS explained. "Based on development trends, however, we calculated that such a project wouldn't be completed until 2014, or roughly two years after the projected release date of Windows Vista. So we decided to switch gears and do something we should have done a long time ago: build our operating system on top of Emacs."

Emacs provided everything that the GNU operating system needed: a text editor, Lisp programming language, and even a kitchen sink. "It was such an elegant solution. We added a few hundred lines of code to Emacs over the weekend and suddenly we had a full-fledged OS kernel," RMS boasted.

With the GNU/Emacs/Hurd kernel finished, RMS hopes to quickly combine all of the various GNU projects into one OS distribution called -- well, we're not sure what it's going to be called, except that RMS promises the name will feature "multilevel acronyms with so many levels of recursion and self-referentialism that nobody will be able to comprehend it."

The Hurd announcement has caught the entire Internet by surprise. The so-called editors at Slashdot were so overwhelmed by the story that they posted ten duplicates, a new record. Meanwhile, the Usenet group alt.gnu.hurd.vapor.vapor.vapor was hit with several thousand posts within the first hour, causing both of the Internet's remaining Usenet servers to crash hard.

"I never thought I'd live to see the day," exclaimed a veteran Unix hacker. "The Hurd in my lifetime! RMS has pulled off the impossible!"

Not everybody is ecstatic about the news. "Dammit, I just lost a thousand dollars!" lamented one poor schmuck who placed a bet with a friend that Windows Vista would be released before Hurd. "First Apple switches to Intel chips, and now this. I can't win!"