Minoca OS: A new open source operating system • Hacker News Board

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#111

Post by ufo » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 12:14 AM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #107

Since Minoca seems to be a Corp., does anyone know what their business strategy will be? I could imagine a) a paid enterprise edition, b) paid support or c) paid consultancy (as in "contract the actual maintainers to implement device drivers for your servers"). Whenever a project is corporate-backed, I like to know the business plan upfront before I consider contributing to it.

Right now it seems that the business model is the MySQL one: provide the code as GPLv3 and sell licenses if someone wants to use it in a proprietary context.

And correct me if I am wrong but I think the corp is just the 2 developers right now.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#112

Post by analognoise » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 12:19 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #65

analognoise wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please post a link to your microkernel, papers, and any books you have published on the subject so I can learn why monolithic kernels are boring and how to do it better. Thanks.

I have such links. I just can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.

It depends; if gp has actual things to back-up what they're saying, then I'd actually like to read them. I'm interested in monokernels because of Haiku, but I'm definitely not an expert.

OTOH, somebody releases a whole OS and the response is "Snore! It isn't a microkernel." - Ok, so...why?

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#113

Post by ams6110 » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 12:39 AM UTC

serge2k wrote: post #106

kybernetyk wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has it any remarkable features other than "it's written in Rust"?

> that is 100+ times faster is that not enough?

Depends on how slow cloc is. 100x faster than "already very fast" is not going to be a perceptible benefit.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#114

Post by delinka » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 1:02 AM UTC

"...it’s simply not in widespread circulation."

And won't be under GPLv3. If your goals are to prevent others from locking up your code in proprietary products, and to give your code to the world, then this license is for you. If your goal is "widespread circulation," this is not the license you want.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#115

Post by c-smile » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 1:07 AM UTC

Question to authors: do you have any graphics layer in-place? Or at least thoughts about its future architecture?

I am thinking about porting my Sciter [1] HTML/CSS UI Engine to an OS that can be used on small (IoT) devices. I think that HTML/CSS as a UI definition/declaration language is quite convenient.

[1] http://sciter.com

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#116

Post by steveklabnik » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 1:25 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #113

serge2k wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that is 100+ times faster is that not enough?

Depends on how slow cloc is. 100x faster than "already very fast" is not going to be a perceptible benefit.

The readme talks about dragonfly BSD's codebase; almost two minutes for cloc, just over one second for loc. That's a noticeable difference.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#117

Post by gh02t » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 1:26 AM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #25

CalChris wrote: post #7

Oh please. You have to start somewhere and this is where they're starting. By comparison, Linus' first announcement was: Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resemble…

Hosting Node and Python already is a hell of a first release announcement.

I don't think this is a first release announcement, it's been around for several years. This is the announcement that they are releasing the code under GPLv3. Previously it was closed source.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#118

Post by cheiVia0 » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 1:27 AM UTC

cturner wrote: post #51

jwatte wrote: post #41

Also, GPL3? Not my favorite license. (MIT/BSD are the best IMO)

I felt this way as well (since the mid nineties) until a couple of weeks ago when I read _Social Architecture_ by Pieter Hintjens. It has a strong idealogical flavour. He stresses that you should focus on building a community, with the code and platform as happy side-effects of that community. For that reason, you want GPL because it forces everything back into the community. He gives examples of a friend of his who…

GPL doesn't force anything back into the community. It only requires freedom for users, not code for upstream.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#119

Post by tssva » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 1:33 AM UTC

jprzybyl wrote: post #80

I'm very excited about this! Minoca is an interesting system, and I applaud any attempt to make driver-writing less inherently horrible. Minoca OS has been around for a while, but the news is that they're GPLv3. I think that's a great thing! The MIT license is good for software that wants to permeate through everything , but for building a community, the GPL is a good idea. It seems that for any operating system to b…

Microsoft has produced several successful operating systems without POSIX compatibility.

Re: Minoca OS: A new open source operating system

#120

Post by pdonis » Tue, Nov 01, 2016, 2:04 AM UTC

dom0 wrote: post #99

gumby wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing about POSIX at this point is back compatibility, nothing to be sneered at! But it carries a lot of (in retrospect) bad habits and decisions from the 60s and 70s as well as a tendency to redundancy due to some competing standards that were unified and need for some back compatibility. Now not everyone agrees on what is good and what is bad, so some experimentation in this area is good for everyone. Exam…

I think the main issues with POSIX are: - (Correct) IO is ridiculously non-portable and painful in so many ways that it isn't even funny anymore - Locks are ridiculously non-portable and painful to the point where you're better off just using "mkdir" - POSIX is stuck in the "everything is bytes and we slap an encoding on it some of the time" era thinking. This makes it painful and hard to implement proper text handli…

> POSIX is stuck in the "everything is bytes and we slap an encoding on it some of the time" era thinking.

I actually view this as a feature. Encoding/decoding of data should be an application level thing, not an OS-level thing. As far as the OS is concerned, data should be bytes.

(Of course, it is true that, since POSIX defines a terminal spec, it has to at least specify how bytes are mapped to characters that print on the terminal. But I would rather see that removed altogether, so a terminal becomes just another application, than have an OS try to muck about with encodings.)