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I'm a GPL advocate, and I agree with you. I will always argue that the GPL is the better license. But I will also alway agree that it's your choice, as a developer, to choose your own license.

Nice ta' meet you. You are the type of GPL advocate that I like to talk to! (In fact, you are the type of GPL Advocate that I talked to in the first place that explained the GPL to me fairly completly, pros and cons included. That got me into supporting projects like Alliance OS Project, Crystal Space 3D, PHPSlash, and a couple others that I've thrown my hat in with, either by using them or being and active member. Now could ya convince others to become 'good' advocates? :-)

It might seem rather Orwellian, but my great fear is that these sometime unruly discussions about software licensing may, in fact, wend their way to the Senate floor. They have, in fact: witness the DMCA. To anyone who has stinking rightious bug up their ass (which, ahem, includes me), I'd just like to say: let's remember which principles matter most. Good life, health, and happiness. Let's keep these cauldrons of principled "screw-you" stew from boiling over into misguided legislation. Really. Legislation, by definition, defines what is and isn't criminal . Let's not go there.

I totally agree. This should never become an issue of legislation, and the DMCA should have never happened (jees, I can't remember talking to anyone yet that actually even so much as plays Devil's Advocate for DMCA in a discussion!), and most certainly it should never get any more draconian than it is now!!!!!

And if we're not going there, then let's not get so uptight about disagreements about software licensing. I mean really. What are people afraid of?

Religion. :-) It's like anything else - when someone suggests that thier believe system may be flawed in any way, some people go on the attack. Then there are those that take thier system of beliefs and automatically apply it to others (I've been guilty of that one before - but, as I got older and started traveling alot, I saw the light. Live and let live.) But in all honesty, to some people the GPL isn't an issue of rights, but an almost full blown religious issue, no less powerful than some overzealous Christians views of other religions! (Luckly, not all 'bad' GPL advocates are that way. A very small (but vocal ;-) percentage is that way.)

Oh, and add one more group to my list of people who piss me off - people who say there aren't any over zealous GPL advocates out there! (Just kidding...)

Firstly I've got to say congratz for knocking this one out. But to be honest how many more Operating Systems do we need?

It's not really a matter of need, as in how many Operating Systems do we need to try and push on people's desktops. Instead, it becomes a matter of people trying different methods of OS Development and different design philosophies. Think about it for a minute - if only 4 or 5 groups created all Operating Systems that are out there, it would be unlikely that new ideas in OS development would be fully explored.

You might want to look around and check out all the Operating Systems there are out there that researchers and hobbiests (sometimes there doesn't seem to be THAT much of a jump between the two ;-) have spent tons of time on. Sometimes they are developed just to 'scratch an itch', sometimes they are developed to see an idea all the way to completion to see how well it works out.

Don't knock these guys for trying to develop a new OS - sometime or another the ideas they come up with may end up in Linux, *BSD, etc. (Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, I work with an alternative OS project that somewhat died, and just got resurected this week. ;-)

We've already been over this:

Freedows: www.freedows.org
Alliance OS: www.allos.org
(Alliance OS broke off from Freedows because of lack of progress and dissatisfaction with the "management"; see the Slashdot article above).
ReactOS (an NT clone): www.reactos.com

I remember when I first read about Freedows. They had such lofty goals, and being rather new to the open source community and seeing the success of Linux, Apache, Perl, and the other biggies, I believed them when they said "We're confident that we'll have this done before the end of 1998." And then it wasn't. And then the website started saying things like "everyone knows this is just a hobby, right? If you're stressing out about it, talk to me, we'll find someone to pick up your slack."

Then came along Alliance OS. Seems a lot of disgruntled Freedows developers migrated to that project after Freedows flopped. It was the same idea, based on the Stanford Cache Kernel paper, except it didn't seem so intent on emulating Windows (though it allowed for writing a layer of compatibility). It seemed really to be going somewhere, with regular status updates, a web page for every subteam, apparently they even had a 1MB source archive. Unfortunately, about half a year ago, the status updates just stopped. The page is still up, you can check it out, but I'm afraid we can consider that one RIP as well. How sad.

I can speak from personal experience when I say that it's easy to look at the success of major open source projects and forget that the authors of them weren't home-educated, CS degree-less adolescents like I am. They were serious computer programmers who knew their stuff before they began. These projects didn't happen by magic, and they weren't effortless fun. Success takes real work. No one will magically write the next vim in a weekend.

I hope that OS development based on the Stanford Cache Kernel comes to be one day. Though I don't know enough about OS internals to understand the merits of it, from the way the FAQs for these projects would talk about it it sounds like a great idea.

Perhaps OS innovation doesn't belong in the open source community. Linux wasn't innovation, it was re-implementation. Maybe writing an open source OS at all is too much. Linus just happened to pick the perfect time in history, where interest was high enough and communication easy enough that a vacuum was filled. No new OS project these days will ever attract the mindshare Linux did (and still does).

I'd almost suggest that if these guys want something to do, that they go and grab the Alliance tarball and start hacking away, but their FTP server seems to be indefinitely down. Ah well...

--

My goals are pretty wide open. My biggest thing isn't to learn a particular area, or to become a guru on a very specific field - instead, my goal is to become a jack of all trades, which I pretty much am now.

For example, I study compression techniques, OS development (Alliance OS, for instance), language development (XBasic, GnomeBasic - yes, I'm STILL a fan of Basic :-), video game development (which is what I do on the side now Look for Boulder Panic! 2 soon! ), MMI development (Jaguar MMI is an Open Source MMI being developed by me), new realtime sound generation systems, etc., etc., etc.

The problem for me is really boredom factor - I really don't want to spend the rest of my life doing any one programming task. Instead, I'd much rather learn to be adaptable, and work on anything that catches my interests. Right now, it's primarily video game development (based on the older game development style, where gameplay was the most important, and flashy graphics were added after you knew the game was going to play great!), but in two years? Who knows.

Heheh...I remember back in 96 or so, they advertised it as Freedows98 (Not just a snack anymore), because they thought that they'd have complete emulation by 1998. But not just of Windows. No, no with the Stanford Cache Kernel, they'd be able to emulate every operating system known to man, in just a few years.

What do they have to show for it? Well http://www.freedows.org/ is a pretty spiffy web site. Translated to a whole buncha languages. But there's no code. There's not even any specifications. And of course, years ago a group broke of from them to form ReactOS, which is supposed to be compatible with NT. Right now, all they have is a small kernel and the beginnings of a command shell. There's also Alliance OS, which like Freedows, is based on the Caching Kernel idea. It also has a nice web site, but very little code.

Seems like that's how most ambitious projects end up. Moral of the story? No matter what they say, most 14 year olds can't code worth a damn, let alone write an operating system. The Freedows team wasted their time doing stupid stuff like writing a C library from scratch. And still, after so many years, they have nothing. That's what I call pathetic.

Another quite similar project exist since a long time, it's allOS. Check AllOS for more info ... They are not promising the moon but they work hard and I hope a lot from this project.

What is Alliance?

Alliance is an Open Source project which is developing an Operating System loosely based upon the Cache Kernel concept as developed by Stanford University and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) from OMG.

Alliance uses the Cache Kernel concept to create an OS environment geared towards the emulation of other Operating Systems and hardware platforms. The goal is not only to have a fantastic OS emulator, but to provide an environment where data can be shared across the OS boundaries. It also provides very intriguing resources for native applications (real-time process support, distributed computing support, and a host of other cool things.)

What is Alliance?

Alliance is an Open Source project which is developing an Operating System loosely based upon the Cache Kernel concept as developed by Stanford University and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) from OMG.

Alliance uses the Cache Kernel concept to create an OS environment geared towards the emulation of other Operating Systems and hardware platforms. The goal is not only to have a fantastic OS emulator, but to provide an environment where data can be shared across the OS boundaries. It also provides very intriguing resources for native applications (real-time process support, distributed computing support, and a host of other cool things.)

Note that the one common thread of gradiose vaporware OS projects is the top down genesis. Web design, job titles, grand visions, logos, documentation, and so on, always kick things off. But there is always the empty void of not one piece of code. Contrast that to successful startups like Linux. It was years before Linux had a logo or official web site or official organization. And productive hackers were never known for their copious output of documentation. The quickest way to evaluate a startup OS project is simple: Show me the code.