Articles from LinuxCon

Hurd was already stagnating when Linus started writing his "strictly a hobby" kernel in 1991. They got caught up in a bout of perfectionism about the design of the kernel, trying to make it "the best kernel ever" and "the wave of the future", as microkernels were thought to be at the time. It didn't help that they changed underlying microkernels several times. So, I don't think that the lack of Linux would have helped the Hurd effort at all.