Re: Design principles

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Sun, 14 Jan 2007 13:23:37 +0100,
Pierre THIERRY <address@hidden> wrote:
> It is probably worth noting that a point where I feel to strongly
> disagree with Marcus is that I think the system should not undermine
> people's ability to implement usage patterns we consider baneful to
> society in it's whole, like proprietary software or DRM. I personnaly
> came to that for psychological and theological reasons, but it is really
> a matter of convinction, not of facts.

I think that view is a bit too simplicistic.  As you will find out
later when you concretize your plans, any specific system design will
encourage some very few use patterns, and discourage almost all
others.  Which ones is a choice you have to make when designing the
system.  What I don't think is that you will be able to avoid making a
choice.

For example, I have demonstrated that "trusted computing" design
patterns can in principle be recovered even in my system design by use
of an intermediating agent.  However, Jonathan said in response,
correctly in my opinion, that the pervasive use of my design patterns
seems to make many "trusted computing" applications entirely
unpractical.  From my point of view, the flip side is also true:
Pervasive use of the EROS design pattern seems to make it impractical
to recover the full control of the user over their resources.

The controversy has centered around a very particular issue in
operating system design, the question how to support mutually
suspicious collaboration.  In that discussion, I have been a
rejectionist.  I have yet to fill that gap by either explaining why
sophisticated mechanisms for mutually suspicious collaboration are not
necessary, or by giving a different model for it.  I am currently
waving back and forth between these two alternatives, and will
eventually write down my thoughts on this.

Pierre, I have yet to hear from you what you want to do *different*
than EROS/Coyotos.  If the answer is "nothing", then accepting
Jonathan's invitation makes a great deal of sense to me.

Thanks,
Marcus