[olpc-software] new os (was: graceful handling of out-of-memory conditions)

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr]

David Zeuthen wrote on Fri, 31 Mar 2006 11:01:30 -0500
> On Fri, 2006-03-31 at 04:13 -0800, Krzysztof Kowalczyk wrote:
> > Even Lisp Machine, 
> 
> Oh my. And, btw, is the source available?

Ask, and you shall receive ;-)

http://www.heeltoe.com/retro/mit/mit_cadr_lmss.html
 
> > Any of those systems seems like a better choice for OLAP than Linux
> > system. Or a system designed and implemented from scratch, that uses
> > the good things that can be learned from those systems (and Linux, if
> > there really is anything to learn from it other than  given a chance
> > to redo things, you would probably want to do everything differently).

There are very good reasons for OLPC to use Linux, but I don't think
these two options are mutually exclusive. So much so that I am doing my
own OS for a kid's computer. It would be just as unreasonable to ask the
Fedora people to give up on Linux to work on something different (HURD?
;-) as to ask me to give up on Neo Smalltalk (previously Self/R and
Merlin OS before that) to help fix Linux. Why not try both alternatives
at the same time and see what result is best?

> Can I suggest 
> 
>  - Getting up to speed on the core technologies we plan to include 
>    for OLPC and review these

Indeed, though I have been using Linux since 1994 and keeping track of
its development I hadn't had a chance to look into stuff like D-BUS or
avahi:

http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/dbus
http://avahi.org/
 
>  - Think hard about why it's so important to people for this to be open
>    source and free software (and why in general this is a good idea)

I didn't understand Krzysztof's examples as an argument against open
source/free software, but as an echo of Alan's "don't forget to see the
best that has been done in the past" advice. Personally, I refuse to
call "educational" anything that the students can't look inside of.

-- Jecel