OSDVL: Move IT!

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

I have written this before, so I apologize in advance to
those who have already read it. But these lists have a
floating membership, so some things are worth repeating.

New OSes are now at the same point that Unix clones were
in the 80s. Everyone is doing their own, but there is
almost no collective progress. The reason for this is
that there is nothing concrete, and everyone things their
ideas are better than everyone else's (which is logical -
if you find an idea which is better than your current
one you can adopt it instantly).

First GNU came along, the Linux and FreeBSD. This
changed everything - there was now a substantial amount
of code available. It became worthwhile putting up with
other people's inferior ideas and work on adding a
little piece to something that was way beyond your own
Unix clone effort.

The difference between then and now is that all the
systems being developed were essentially the same,
and they fought over little details. The New OSes vary
radically from each other (most don't even have their
details worked out yet) - giving up your project to
add to someone else's requires a lot of sacrifice. It
was easy for people to work together on a Unix clone:
you just told someone "you will do a vi replacement".
Most current projects involve a significant amount of
research.

Here is something I think could help: an OS table. We
already have great lists, like
http://www.lfbs.rwth-aachen.de/~sven/OS-Projects/index.html

We need a table where each row is a different OS and
each column is a certain feature. You could view the
page for a feature and compare all OSes or look at the
page for an OS and have a summary of its characteristics.
Going to the page for a given cell would give you
a detailed description of that feature for that OS.
Anyone should be able to add new features or new OSes,
as well as add comments to any page (and to other
comments, forming a very specific discussion).

If noone implements something like this, I will work
on it (it is finally coming to the front of my
ToDo queue).
-- 
-----=============( Jecel Mattos de Assumpcao Jr )===========-----
http://www.lsi.usp.br/~jecel/merlin.html | mailto:jecel@lsi.usp.br