Its no coincidence that Thorvalds and Mickos put out a good product and have achieved success in a far faster and more profound manner than stallman who is so kooky that even most in the OSS community shudder every time he gets up to blowviate.
Now where is that Hurd kernel again? Stallman started it 17 years ago and it's only up to version 0.2! And he doesn't even have to write the microkernel, as he's using Mach.
I know it's microkernel-based, so it's harder, but that's no excuse. Tanenbaum wrote Minix from scratch and released it with textbooks in the late 80s only as a teaching tool. It wasn't much, just the bare skeleton of an OS to show students how it's done. He didn't start trying to make it a real production OS until probably after 2000, and now Minix 3 is already ahead of Hurd. And Tanenbaum only had a student and a couple programmers working on it.
Nevermind on Mach, looks like he’s switched kernels again. Stallman can’t even figure out what he wants to base his kernel on.