The latest webcomic from XKCD is spot on

Apr 6, 2015 08:22 GMT  ·  By

The XKCD webcomics are funny because they are usually right on the money, with just a side dish of ridiculousness. The latest one is called Operating Systems and encompasses everything that is done wrong in this world, with just a single drawing and small, smart text about Richard Stallman.

It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, Niels Bohr once said, and it seems to be true. No matter how fantastic our predictions are, the future always seems to invalidate them one way or another. The same could be said about the operating systems in the past 30 years. No one could predict what happens with Windows and Linux.

Linus Torvalds said in this first email regarding Linux that he thought it would probably amount to nothing, but he was wrong, so wrong that Linux is now powering most of the devices on this small planet. What will happen in the future with Mac OS X, Linux, Android, or Windows is anyone's guess, but somehow the latest XKCD webcomic feels right.

Richard Stallman and GNU Hurd will be the only ones to survive the end of the world

To be fair, this entire comic seems to be just for GNU Hurd, which has been in the works for so many years that it almost became a joke. It's not there yet, and bit and pieces of information still come from the project, but the assessment is that it will never be ready.

The comic is also accompanied by a short text that appears if you hover with the mouse, "One of the survivors, poking around in the ruins with the point of a spear, uncovers a single photo of Richard Stallman. They stare in silence. 'This,' one of them finally says, 'This is a man who BELIEVED in something.

via XKCD