Re: operating system design AND implementation

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Sat, 2006-08-12 at 21:17 +0200, Guillaume FORTAINE wrote:
> cyn0n rautha wrote...

rautha expresses many personal opinions. I disagree but I won't argue.

He states only two facts. Both are incorrect or misleading:

> >   I thought L4 would be great but then
> >   everyone wants to wait for coyotes which is a fucking commerical
> >   endeavor!

Two errors here:

  1. I don't know if Neal and Marcus have made any final decision about
     Coyotos. My impression is that it is more a matter of "this is the
     best option we see at the moment", but I don't know that any final
     decision has been made.

  2. Coyotos is a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University, which
     is a non-profit educational institution, and The EROS Group, LLC,
     which is a for-profit corporation. Yes, The EROS Group will be
     doing commercial things with Coyotos, but the core system will
     continue to be open source. A few other companies come to mind
     that do this type of thing: RedHat, SUSE, Novell, Sleepycat...

The fact that the project is commercial means that at least *somebody*
is committed to building something -- which is part of what people here
have been struggling with. The issue here is not whether I will make
money from my labor of 15 years -- or if it is, then too bad.

But it also means that I have a legal and financial responsibility to
pay attention to customer requirements first. Not all of the Coyotos
objectives are Hurd objectives -- Marcus and Neal and I knew that at the
very beginning. Rautha (and some others) don't like that. That's okay.
Anybody who doesn't like Coyotos is welcome to start their own operating
system project. They are even welcome to use the Coyotos kernel if
that's helpful.

Instead of insulting people who are actually doing something, perhaps
rautha should consider that I'm effectively *donating* several million
dollars worth of experience and code to the community. I don't expect
anybody to throw me a party or anything, but simple courtesy and
civility doesn't seem like too much to ask.


> > Shapiro is quite an asshole...

That might actually be correct, but I'm a very *effective* asshole. :-)
In any case, it's completely okay with me that you think so.

> >   I know less than 20 lines of assembly will boot a kernel into
> >   protected mode...

Not on IA-32. Any realistic system takes a lot more than that just to
find out how much memory you have and where.


shap