OSNews

The idea of using prizes to spur creativity and research is a technique that is known to be very effective. Witness the recent DARPA Grand Prize and the X-Prize tournaments. While the OS-Newsproposed contest is partially meant to be a promotion for OS-News (nothing wrong with that), it will also be beneficial in publicizing alternative OSes. Question is, does the world really need another me-too operating system? I don't think so. This contest runs the risk of being just another appeal to a relative small community of alternative OS fanatics who are in it mostly for the fun of it. What would be nice is a contest that offers a substantial prize ($millions a la X-Prize) for the development of a new OS that solves a particularly pressing problem in the industry. I suggest that the most pressing problem faced by the computer industry is not power management or processing speed. The biggest problem in the industry is software reliability. How about a $10-million prize for the first comprehensive OS that is guaranteed 100% bug-free? Not an easy thing to do and the rules would have to be worked out so as to be unambiguous on the meaning of bug-free. Let me suggest that OSNews get together with the X-Prize commitee (or DARPA, or whoever) and convince them of the potential bebefits of such a prize.

I'll be frank (shameless plug), I am proposing this contest because I believe I could put together a team to win it. It has to do with my faith in non-algorithmic, signal-based, synchronous software. I don't believe that unreliability has to be an essential charateristic of complex software systems.

Louis Savain

Edited 2006-06-16 18:47