TUNES development startup

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Faré wrote:
>    I'm in contact with various people to found a startup company that
> would develop TUNES. Any advice, contact, funding, idea, etc, is welcome.

Considering that I have started two companies (in 1986 and in 1999),
you might want to take my advice. Considering that I haven't yet made
any money at all, you might prefer to ignore me ;-)

> We're particularly trying to define
> 1) a business plan.

This is critical. It is important to note that the OS market is dead,
so positioning Tunes as an OS would be fatal. Be has released BeOS 5
for free and Lucent has done the same for Plan 9. QNX is going the same
route. Linux is, of course, the cause for all this. I think only
Microsoft is still able to make money on OSes, but even that shouldn't
last more than two years or so (if the company does get split up, I
wouldn't want to end up in the OS half...).

My business plan is to make money selling hardware, so I can give the
OS (Self/R) away for free (including for other people's hardware, PCs,
so mine has to be really good in order to sell!).

In short - a good business plan would be to have a great product that
would use Tunes as an enabling technology.

Another advice is to find good names for things. The Transmeta people
couldn't raise any money to work on "dynamic binary translation". All
they had to do was renamed this to "code morphing" and the venture
capitalists suddenly became very interested!

> 2) a development schedule.

I have a nice Pert chart on my wall showing how I would be finished in
September of 1987. But even so, I have some advice: check out the
Extreme Programming web sites (like http://www.extremeprogramming.org/
and http://www.xprogramming.org) for a very reasonable development and
planning method.

> The idea would be to raise funds thanks to an early prototype,
> so that the path to such a prototype is important, and advice is sought.

How would this relate to the various "Tunes fringe" development
projects?

> Once funding is found, we can afford hiring some people almost full
> time on the project with a decent salary...

This is what I am trying to achieve as well, but I am trying to get
funding from early customers instead of investors (not that I have much
choice, down here in Brazil).

This is a big step and I wish you the best of luck in this. I want to
help in any way that I can.

-- Jecel
P.S.: I sent this email on Tuesday, but replied only to Faré instead of
the list by accident. Today I was reading an article about trusted
system and Open Source and was thinking that this could be a good niche
for Tunes. With its proof systems and formal specifications, it could
overcome the problems mentioned:

      http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/06/21/1333222&mode=thread