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You don't know that you are wasting your time

I meant to write follow-up articles on the subject, but instead was sent by court order to Article Title School for two years. In the meantime, the world, and my perception of things - not just article titles - evolved. While I hope that someone, somewhere, found the advice helpful enough to start writing a kernel, I've realized in the meantime that the fun of doing that from scratch has - for all intents and purposes - actually been outlawed.

I hope I catch you before you burn any proof that you ever downloaded the Intel System Programming Manuals, as you look nervously through the window for the Code Police to come and send you to coder rehab. Cheer up, writing your own kernel is not really outlawed and you don't have to move to writing accounts receivable software in C#. A lot of people with commitment, strong programming skills and free time are working on such projects as you read this, even though there is no point anymore. Some projects, such as Syllable and SkyOS, have made major progress towards a usable and stable operating environment and never fail to legitimately impress OSNews readers with their skills. The irony of such an opinion on OSNews is not lost on me. I expect kernel hobbyists to dismiss this article in the same way as I would have two years ago. Giving up rare skills that you built over a long time is not easy to accept. As a recovering kernaholic, I would love nothing more than being proven wrong by a strong, one-two punch demonstration, and to be conned into participating in a hobby OS project.

To be honest, I'm not holding my breath. Unless your only objective is to displace Robert Szeleney as the most admired underdog OS developer, your effort is probably wasted. I need to explain how I slowly evolved to this conclusion, and how this is a positive development. There is one piece of information and two colliding storylines that come into play.

How you can learn from being punched in the nose repeatedly

The piece of information first. I became a manager out of experience, not out of a Harvard MBA, so I like to hope that anyone with a decent business training will read the rest of the article and say "yes, so what?". Well, pfft! to you - that's the sound of the tongue sticking out. I haven't been taught product positioning in school, or how to focus on what you're really good at. I've learned by coming back from customers with a bloody nose. Moving on to the first storyline. Last year, I seriously considered joining the Syllable project. It is the only desktop OS project on the market that I know of, that is at the same time usable, open source, and where I could make a significant contribution, unlike Linux for which an individual contribution is a drop in the ocean. The Syllable kernel has significant shortcomings. You can feel the round-robin scheduler and dysfunctional VM as you use the desktop. The lack of consistent primitives or clear notion of processes has obnoxious side effects such as the application server not closing windows of an application when it crashes. I thought I could help out instead of criticizing from my armchair. I did a lot of work on replacing the basic kernel with something that could support the rest of Syllable being dropped on top, and compete performance-wise with the Linux kernel.

Now for the second storyline. I created a company that develops, sells and promotes a software component architecture for consumer electronics products. The company has been around since 1998, and the product started out as software that I enjoyed writing - an operating system. Essentially, the product offered two opposed features. First, a component based operating system for consumer electronics products, the first of its kind, that lets you replace any system policy such as scheduling, memory management and power management, by your own. Second, a component model that basically transfers the well-known benefits of Corba, DCOM or .NET such as increased code-reuse and cleaner isolation, to the Consumer Electronics world. The re-use is a massive problem at the moment in the industry, since manufacturers have essentially moved from being hardware companies producing VCRs and analog TVs that had little custom software, to being software companies producing DVD-RWs and Digital TVs that require staggering amounts of custom software. We tried really, really hard to pitch our operating system to customers.

1. "Do not write kernels, Page 1/3"
2. "Do not write kernels, Page 2/3"
3. "Do not write kernels, Page 3/3"