Comparison of GNU-Hurd with GNU-Linux

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There truly is a Linux, and these individuals are utilizing it, however it is only a piece of the framework they utilize. Linux is the part: the project in the framework that apportions the machine's assets to alternate projects that you run. The kernel is a fundamental piece of an operating system, yet futile independent from anyone else; it can just capacity in the setting of a complete working framework/any system. Linux is ordinarily utilized as a part of mix with the GNU working framework: the entire framework is essentially GNU with Linux included, or GNU/Linux. All the alleged "Linux" circulations are truly dissemination of GNU/Linux.

Software engineers by and large realize that Linux is a kernel. Be that as it may, since they have for the most part heard the entire system called "Linux" also, they frequently imagine a history that would legitimize naming the entire framework after the portion. For instance, numerous trust that once Linus Torvalds got done with composing Linux, the kernel, its clients glanced around for other free programming to run with it, and found that (for no specific reason) most all things needed to make a Unix-like system was at that point accessible.

When consider about our Gnu-Hurd may be composition-ally predominant, it is far behind as far as steadiness, execution, highlights, and so forth. The explanation behind this is just that it has less engineer time behind it. With the end goal it should get up to speed, it needs those missing hours put in. The issue is, the place would they say they are going to originate from? Possibly software engineers will incline toward taking a shot at the Hurd because of its prevalent coolness, measured quality and general panache. Maybe the Hurd group will abuse the way that Linux is under the Gnu General Public License and simply duplicate what they require, in this way "cloning" engineer hours that went into Linux. That would be both compelling and "reasonable," considering the enormous measure of GNU programming that went into making Linux.

Hurd will never be a win on the grounds that it's been composed in a base up way. Hurd has more significant issues. 

1)      For quite a while, it was a "cathedral" outline; it didn't get engineer mind share in light of the fact that it wasn't keen on outside designers. GCC experienced the same issue, until Cygnus forked the code base - driving the FSF to either open up GCC advancement or get to be superfluous.

2)      These days, it needs engineers, yet most programmers are more inspired by Linux or BSD.

3)      Numerous Linux engineers are utilized by companies to take a shot at Linux; said organizations, who never upheld the basic early improvement of the Linux kernel, have no comparable enthusiasm for funding Hurd advancement.

4)      Hurd prohibited the non-free device drivers. Linux permitted them.

The above points are comparing gnu-Hurd and the Linux. There is a basic contrast between the two. Linux is a well-known and business achievement while Hurd is still in the process of development for more than twenty years.

Legal Constraints of GNU HURD

GNU Hurd’s legal aspects can be discussed into two sections as Copyright Trademark and Free Software Licenses. In the Free Software movement GNU Hurd protects the term “Intellectual property” because, GNU project is initiated with the aim of developing the software, and to promote the creation of more ideas from the users. According to www.gnu.org, this has been accomplished rather professionally, that if a technical person has a piece of code or document to contribute, he ought to sign the legal copyright papers from Free Software Foundation regarding copyright for his work. Thus, the GNU project is still under development by the user-community, because of the acceptance of this legal support of copyright. They still releases software versions.

GNU software avoids legal difficulties, and other related issues by referring to proprietary programs, accepting contributions and the way it deals with trademark issues.

·           Referring to Proprietary Programs

If you have a vague recollection of the internals of a UNIX program, this does not absolutely mean you can’t write an imitation of it, but do try to organize the imitation internally along different lines, because this is likely to make the details of the UNIX version irrelevant and dissimilar to your results.

·           Accepting Contributions

User is able to add a piece of code to the program by signing the legal papers of copyright given by the Free Software Foundation related to the contribution. Even for a nontrivial contribution to a program must sign legal papers to get a title to the program. This applies both before the release of the program and afterwards. Legal papers is expected to fix a bug in the software regarding significant change.

·           Trademarks

Actually, Trademark is another way of referring to brands and brands can be protected by registered trademark. Trademarks are an effective communication tool especially for customers to find a software. Trademarks can convey intellectual and emotional attributes, messages about a software or company, company’s reputation of products and services.  If such company wants to compete in the industry, trademark helps to distinguish itself from the market.  However, the GNU Hurd official web site claims that there isn’t any trademark acknowledgments in GNU software packages or documentation and they don’t allow any trademark and they reason out as there isn’t any need for using trademark. So, GNU Hurd doesn’t seem to have a registered trademark. This is why the GNU Hurd is unrecognized in the industry. And this would be a prominent reason for the drawback of the project as well.  

The licenses for most software are designed to take away users’ freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee users freedom to share and change free software to make sure the software is free for all its users.

GNU a brief introduction

GNU Hurd is a Unix-like operating system. The main aim of GNU project is to use a computer with a software that will not infringe users’ freedom. This philosophy was later published as the GNU Manifesto in March 1985. GNU is a collection of programs such as applications, developer tools, libraries and even games. The development of GNU started in January 1984, and it was named as GNU Project. Most of the GNU programs are released under GNU Project which are known as GNU Packages.

Richard Stallman initiated the GNU Hurd operating system project in 1983, as a project to create a complete free operating system. It was released as a free software under the GNU general public license (first it was called Emacs General Public License) which was also written by Stallman. The goal of this license is to guarantee users freedom to share and change free software. The reason behind the creation of this license was his experience with James Gosling and a program called UniPress.

In 80’s most of the GNU packages had its own license. The GCC General Public License, the Emacs General Public License etc. In 1989, Free Software Foundation (FSF) published a common license “GNU general public license” which they could use for all their software and which could also be used by non-GNU projects.

GNU's own kernel, The Hurd is a multi-server micro kernel written as a part of GNU. Thomas Bushnell claims that HURD is an acronym for "Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons," where "Hird" is intended to mean "Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth". It has been designed as a replacement of UNIX kernel and was in development since 1990 by the GNU project of the Free Software Foundation. Hurd is a collection of protocols and server processes (daemons) which runs on the GNU Mach micro kernel to implement network protocols and authentication, file systems, file access control and other features that are normally implemented by the UNIX kernel.

Hurd provides a compatibility layer such that providing higher level programs is essentially transparent. Their mission is to “create a general-purpose kernel suitable for the GNU operating system, which is viable for everyday use, and gives users and programs as much control over their computing environment as possible.”

The development of Hurd has proceeded slowly, it has yet not considered suitable for production environments. There are still a significant number of bugs to be corrected and some missing features, as a whole the development in general has not met expectations. After more than twenty years under development they were not very optimistic about the GNU Hurd, it required solving some deep problems.

When it comes to the task of creating a kernel, Stallman had his hands partially tied up by the necessity to maintain already developed products as well as the lack of understanding of the OS design issues. But unlike Linus Torvalds’s vision (the creator of the LINUX kernel), his vision of GNU kernel development was more modest. His vision was not to re-implement a kernel using key ideas of BSD kernel (Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) is a UNIX operating system) as a blueprint, but to reuse an existing prototype. Unfortunately his idea of choosing Mach micro kernel as a prototype did not full fill his requirement of speeding up the work.

GNU Hurd’s project growth is considered to be slow. It's really more a set of ideas than an operating system. Although Gnu Hurd is architecturally superior, it is a long way behind in terms of stability, performance, features etc.

According to our research the main drawbacks of Hurd are as follows,

• GNU Hurd had failed to deliver on its promise of an entirely free UNIX replacement.
• There were number of technical shortcomings with the design of the Hurd.
• Linux stepped in and provided an advanced operating system which picked up GNU Hurd’s slack and which is ready to use.
• One of the biggest issues in Hurd is that, when a client makes a call, instead of server performing the requested action kernel and other resources are allocated for that purpos
• Hurd didn’t satisfy user requirements: Users care about the applications and hardware support more than the underlining architecture arrangements.
• The initial idea of GNU was to build a micro kernel based OS but the Hurd kernel was not built in the requested time to continue their proceedings of building a GNU OS.
• Constantly switching priorities and technology.

Event Marketing and Social Media Marketing

Event Marketing

Print Marketing – which can loosely be defined as any paper form of advertising – this is the oldest form of traditional marketing which has been in use since ancient times (Marketing-schools, 2014). This includes Posters, leaflets, newspaper advertisements and other printed materials. This form of marketing was effective till other form of marketing took over, such as broadcast- which aired its 1^st on-air advertisement 2^nd November 1920, followed by telemarketing and direct mails.

Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984 were the first time event marketing concept was used (Behrer and Larsson, 1998). The companies sponsored for the event not only got an opportunity to expose their logos, the sponsors were also allowed to use their connection to the event in their other marketing communications. This was where the concept of event marketing was initiated (Behrer and Larsson, 1998).

'Event marketing' is a tool, where marketing underlies as the core. Anna and Jessica also state that 'It turns a message into an event' and carries it to the targeted group of audience. It is not a substitute for other promotion tools and media; it simply is used in combination with other promotion tools and media according to Behrer and Larsson (1998).

'No other marketing discipline is expanding as heavily as event marketing today', these words appeared in a journal by Jessica Eriksson and Anna Hjalmsson (2000) in the year 2000. It has been a decade and a half and it still stands strong and has grown stronger ever since. The research also agrees with Jessica and Anna’s view on event marketing. Event marketing has reached new feats after the social media took over marketing.

One issue frequently brought up by researchers as being of importance, is the evaluation of event effectiveness. According to Lundell (1999) referred in Anne and Jessica's report state that the lack of relevant and unitary measuring methods of event marketing is a problem. They also state 'Therefore it is important to develop measure methods that can prove the effectiveness of event marketing'.

Social Media Marketing

Marketing is a well-developed methodological science and is constantly changing its rules according to the needs and developments taking place in and around its (Saravanakumar and Suganthalakshmi, 2012).Social media marketing is now growing at a rapid speed.

Social media marketing is a technique that is used to persuade the potential customer to buy a product or service making it worthwhile. According to Gattiker (2010), social media marketing is the 'process of promoting your brand, service or product and building your reputation through social media channels, such as weblogs and social networks' like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (Nagahawatta, 2012). 

Over the past 40 years, there has been a radical shift in how business is conducted and how people cooperate (Abu Bashar, Irshad Ahmad and Mohammad Wasiq, 2012). Social media is being widely used by almost all and  even  the  companies,  in  spite  of  their  size  have started  using  social media to  advertise  and  themselves.

Social media marketing offers three distinct advantages (Neti, 2011). He has showed that social media marketing allows the marketer to get feedbacks and suggestions directly from the customers. Since the Feedbacks are directly from the customers the marketers can rely on the unprocessed feedbacks and understand the customer's needs as well as market trends. This also would allow the marketer to get a better understanding of how customers rate and use their products versus the competitive product.

Also, Neti (2011) has elaborated on how Social Media marketing allows the marketers to identify peer groups among various other groups, who can help in organic growth of the brand. This allows the marketers to listen to peer groups and to understand their methodologies and approach in marketing through social media. Moreover Neti has pointed out that social media marketing is cost effective - all this is done nearly at zero cost.

Social Media Marketing in Business

In the recent years the media clutter increased heavily (Hjalmsson and Eriksson, 2000). It has become hard and expensive, to reach and influence target group through traditional methods (Hjalmsson and Eriksson, 2000). Companies quickly realized that social media was more efficient and started adopting social media marketing at different rates; 39% of the companies surveyed by McKinsey Quarterly use social media services as their primary digital tool to reach customers (Saravanakumar and Suganthalakshmi, 2012).The number of businesses that say Facebook is critical or important to their business has increased by 75%(hubspot, 2014)

A study, "The state of small business report," done by the university of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of business as mentioned in Neti's(2011) journal points out that small business owners has increased  their social media usage from 12% to 24% in the year 2010 alone.

Social Media Marketing in Organizations.

Not only social media has invaded the business and marketing practices, it also has offered numerous opportunities to non-profit organizations to interact with the public.

A research conducted by Lindley Curtis et al (2009:91-92) to find out 'how a non-profit public practitioners were adopting social media tools' showed that 'of the respondents (N = 409), nearly all (n = 404) indicated that they used some form of social media'. This research also points out that one practitioner used the average of 5 social media tools. Lindley Curtis et al (2009) conclude stating that social media tools are becoming beneficial methods of communication for non-profit organizations.

When the Social Media play a major role in day-to-day life of people it must be safe and accurate/ precise. Especially in case of business it should be more precise since marketers and business personals take major decisions and changes based on customer feedbacks through Social Media

References

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• Abu Bashar, Irshad Ahmad and Mohammad Wasiq. (2012). Effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool - an empirical study. International Journal of Marketing, Financial Services & Management Research.
• An Introduction to Buffer - Bufferapp.com, (2014). An Introduction to Buffer - Buffer. [Online] Available at: https://bufferapp.com/guides [Accessed 14 Sep. 2014].
• Annie Wallace, (2011). 9 Sins of Google Analytics - Search Engine Journal. [Online] Search Engine Journal. Available at: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/9-sins-of-google-analytics/27931/ [Accessed 3 Dec. 2014].
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