The logic here is that your opinion on the value of the Hurd isn't objective and that there's no accounting for taste. The Hurd authors know the fruits of their labor far better than you do. If they don't consider their effort wasted and are happy with their results, what are you upset about? If programmers like working on things you don't like, that's their own business.
This is about people sitting on their asses disparaging the work done by others in their freetime as "a waste of time". If we started saying that you were wasting your time with your hobby, you would be right in telling us to fuck off.
"I care because it's wasted effort that would be better spent elsewhere."
This idea that programmers must somehow "donate their free-time to the betterment of society" or whatever the hell you are suggesting is frankly quite offensive.
Getting pissy about it doesn't change the fact that the Hurd serves no useful purpose and doesn't have an interesting idea animating it, just a series of shop-worn ideas from 2 decades ago.
If I spent my off-hours building, say, a slightly different clone of Java that I'd started in 1996, you'd be entitled to tell me that I was wasting my time. In fact, this would be doing me a service. If I couldn't turn around and say, "well, Onanva is different from Java because of interesting features X, Y and Z" or "Onanva is about to take over from Java because I've got 100K users in beta and they're screaming for a commercial version" or whatever, then I'd have some serious introspection to do. What I wouldn't do is go into a screaming frenzy that someone who is "sitting on their ass" (whatever that means) is disparaging my precious, precious work and start running around with my dress over my head.
I can't tell from your profiles whether you or Mr P9 have ever been in an environment where you get asked tough questions, but any decent CS school will make you run the "why is this interesting/useful" gauntlet repeatedly, especially if you want to get a PhD or something silly like that. The bulk of the cruel, cruel people who ask you these terrible questions will do so from a seated position, and it will be imperative on you to harden up and supply answers. Not every hobbyist has to deal with this sort of thing, but not everyone outside industry or academic research is incapable of doing so; see also Young Torvalds vs. Tanenbaum for a less pathetic approach to criticism.
Programmers are free to do whatever they want; I doubt that a better OS will have much to do with the "betterment of society" in any case (you're not sure what I'm suggesting, but you're sure it's "quite offensive"). IMO they should work on projects that are objectively interesting. It's ok to disagree on what that might be, but no-one has been able to furnish a reason why building a UNIX clone on top of Mach (again, after cycling through several other underlying microkernels) is in fact interesting in 2011.
Most people watch TV or play video games in their free time. These people choose to work on the Hurd.
What you are doing is simply being an asshole.
"IMO they should work on projects that are objectively interesting."
I rest my case. If you have a better idea of what they should be doing, pay them to do it. Don't tell anyone what they should or should not do otherwise.
Furthermore, my background, p9idf's background, and the PhD process all have fuck all to do with what other people do with their own free time.
Leaving aside your frenzied name-calling, you are unclear on the concept of criticism. It is possible to make and even promulgate value judgements on the work of other people; further, to suggest that some ways of spending your free time are objectively more useful or interesting than others. This applies even if you don't pony up the cash to fund alternative works.
As a rule academics, writers, artists and critics (for example) have all felt reasonably empowered to say all sorts of things about each other - often in language that would make my 'why is this interesting' stuff seem positively tame - without giving undue weight to the fact that the target of the criticism could be otherwise spending time watching soccer or masturbating. When I got my ass rightfully handed to me for trying to get a mediocre paper into SIGMETRICS a few years back, not one reviewer made positive mention of the fact that at least I was writing lousy papers as opposed to, say, punching people on the street or making a color-sorted collection of my nose pickings.
Casual internet forum judgements are worth very little, and one can ignore them one sees fit. I don't remember the bit where I proposed making further research on the Hurd illegal or running them out of town on a rail. One might even muster up a coherent argument against such judgements that doesn't depend on the All Important Right of Enthusiasts to Exist in a Plane Above All Comment on the Relevance of their Work.
