Re: Changing from L4 to something else...

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

On Friday 28 October 2005 03:17 pm, Marcus Brinkmann wrote:
> And of course if you feel that this topic becomes increasingly
> inappropriate for this list, we can create a different list for such
> discussions.  hurd-discuss, for example.

No problem for me, besides that there are too many mails for me. :p

> I am not sure I understand your example.  If the user started a
> program that plays bad music, he can kill this program of course.  The
> user should have total control over the resources the user owns.  And
> he should have all the information he needs to make informed
> decisions.
>
> If the speakers are not on the user's desk, he shouldn't have a
> capability to activate them :)

As Jonathan presented a good answer for this, I show some more examples (I can 
think of more, if you want):

Suppose that you are working in a company, and you are considered as an 
administrator of a shared machine. The machine has a 100GB disk. Since your 
company is quite free, everybody likes to store as many movies as possible. 
So you decide to allow each one to use up to 10GB, as it is used by 10 
people.

One day, a customer asks you data processing, and you realize that it requires 
at least 20GB. Since everybody in your company wants to use disk space at 
max, each one uses 9.9GB. So even if you remove all of your data, the free 
space is only 11GB. Now you must find a way to make more space as soon as 
possible. What do you want to do?


Another one. You share a machine connected to the internet with your 
girlfriend. Your girlfriend likes to take pictures and publish them with a 
web server.

One day, she by mistake puts very shameful pictures in a public page, but she 
realizes that after she goes for a trip. Since she is now in an extremely 
inconvenient area, she cannot connect to the internet. So she needs you to 
remove or hide them. But she suddenly forgets her password, and even the 
location of the pictures precisely. You must find them by yourself. What do 
you want to do?

> But here is my suggestion: If you want to become co-maintainer of the
> Hurd, I will happily pull all strings I have to make it happen, and
> promise that I won't interfere with what you want to do.

Bad joke. Being a maintainer is the worst thing I have ever experienced. 
Honestly, I do not want to be *any* maintainer. Thanks to Free Software, I 
can do whatever I wish to do without being a maintainer, as long as I am 
interested only in technical things. So if someone wants to take over any of 
my maintainer's tasks, I can give it away anytime. But I don't want any 
more. :)

Okuji