Re: Project: FreeOS

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <387F0E96.76C0D0A3@icn.siemens.de>,
  Alfred Hilscher <Alfred.Hilscher@icn.siemens.de> wrote:
> you are right. No one of us could do this all himself. The real
> challenge is to find enough people to participate. If you once have
> found them you can do your own job (see Linus Torvalds).

Right. To share from my personal experience, just getting a useful or
promising system published is the key. If it is truly worthwhile people
are perfectly willing to help improve the project. At that point you
just have to try not to drive them away. :-)

But someone has to sit down and devote the time to get the project to
that initial state. And when I say someone, I generally mean someONE. I
don't think it can be effectively done by committe.

Not to pick on Nick et. al., but that is my impression of what is going
on in the "OS in Ada" project ( http://www.adapower.com/lab/adaos.html
). Its suffering from a massive case of what Alan Cox called the
"Town Council" effect. There has been tons of discussion, but all they
really have to show for it so far is a short list of very abstract
objectives. To be specific; it'll be Open Source software in
Object-Oriented Ada, perhaps using literate programming techniques.
I'm guessing that one of two things will happen with this project.
Either Nick will sit down for a month or so and pump out a basic kernel
of his own design for everyone to start hacking on, or it will dissapate
into a cloud of entropy within the next 4 months.

To put it another way, just talking about a project you'd like to see
done isn't particularly helpful. To quote Linus, "show me the source."

(reference-  http://slashdot.org/features/98/10/13/1423253.shtml )

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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