PierrePronchery

pierre@defora.org

2004 Pierre Pronchery Nowadays mainly two conceptions of computing compete: open source and proprietary software. I believe that most software should be available with its source code, as a proof of quality, interoperability, and security, to only quote the most obvious reasons. However, most open source operating systems are based on UNIX. While this can be considered as a mature, stable and portable operating system, its use can be cryptic, and users are often facing technical inner workings of this system. Moreover, most human-computer interfaces, either in text or graphical mode, and even configuration files, are incoherent between each other, and particularly in community open source systems. It is also certainly worth thinking about a technical re-design of the UNIX system. It has been originally designed along with C, with a monokernel approach, on computers where every single characted handling avoided counted. Now the power of even 10 years old computers is far beyond this, and researchers are working on micro-kernels, and safe programming languages for instance. Today I think my ideal operating system should be open source, micro-kernel based, usable on pentium-class computers, coherent, connected, and distributed. This paper explains in detail how I would design and implement it. It seems reasonable, if not obvious, to determine independant tasks within the huge work described before in this document. There follows a proposal. The only essential part of these services is their appengine/session (?). At the moment it is not yet known if the system will be based on, or provide a native POSIX development environment. It may be possible to write an application engine providing the POSIX system and library calls, on which the POSIX utilities would connect as usual application interfaces. We could even imagine them with a graphical interface, which would fallback as the regular UNIX commands if the graphical toolkit is denied (using stdin, stdout and stderr as usual).