Was it? It's just one Unix clone over the other. This "shadowboxing" is going on since inception of time (I mean, Unix epoch).
> I find it notable that you went straight for the emotional angle.
It is a result of my impression that there is just nothing on the technical ground that is worth investigating.
The whole project builds up on emotions. What else is there to say?
> I think Linux changed the world […]
Did it? It just prolonged the eternal rule of Unix, imho.
Linux, in some sense, freezed the long standing status quo in time… (Which is btw. part of my "no progress" argument).
> There is nothing else like SerenityOS.
I would say there were already quite of those projects.
Nothing else is more popular than building Unix clones! It's a special feature when a system is not a Unix clone. Not the other way around.
> Your core point is that SerenityOS is too derivative and steals too shamelessly from everybody else.
No, that's not my argument.
It's more that SerenityOS does not add anything new, or even mildly interesting. It's technologically stuck far back in the 70's, like almost all Unix clones.
Even Google, know for their "boring tech" mantra, arrived in the late 80's with their Fuchsia OS.
Actually also MS does have more modern concepts stashed in the drawer. But SerenityOS? No, nothing there.
The point is: When you're anyway rebuilding the world this would be the perfect chance to bring some innovation. Stuff that's laying around in academia for 30 - 50 years, where the main reason imho for not using it is the necessity to rebuild too much things form scratch. Now someone started to rebuild things form scratch. And what? Again the exact same stuff that we have already for 50 years… That's more than disappointing!
But I understand: Trying to be innovative has a high risk of failure and it's at times quite likely going to be frustrating. But the person behind this project wanted some fun distraction. A "game" where he knows for sure that he will win eventually (in the sense of getting something up and running). The reason for this undertaking is that such a "game" is stress relieving and distracting from otherwise hard times.
> Innovating in Linux is more politics than technology […]
I would generalize this to "Innovating is in reality always more politics than technology".
And because everything's a people and economical problem real technological (or also scientific) progress is so hard. It's hard to convince people about new ideas. It's hard to find founding for them.
Having something that will quite likely "succeed" (according to a very narrow and / or shallow definition of success usually) is on the other hand an easy sell.
When you're able to present some shiny stuff (especially quickly) that will attract people.
When then again you come with some "abstract nonsense" and some weird ideas nobody ever tried before it's a very hard sell. (You know, "exceptional claims …" and such).
> SerenityOS can change whatever it wants in the core ecosystem.
One could see this in the opposite way also: Nobody can change there anything without approval form the BDFL, or a complete fork of everything.
That works not even 100% proper for Linux, though it works mostly fine there. But it works mostly fine because of the much narrower scope of Linux.
When you have instead just everything in one place there is not much room for anything that could diverge. Which is in the long run a killer to any substantial change. Ever heard the story that Google's not able to update anything in its core anymore because everything depends on everything?
Also there was a project that was not much different than SerenityOS: Redox OS. It was highly hyped in the beginning. It also tried to rewrite the world. It also was an extreme example of NIH syndrome. (The only difference being that I suspect that the Serenity dude is much more skilled than Redox's "80%-boy"). Where is it now? It had at least some promise of slight innovation (Rust, micro kernel, some nonsense around URLs, etc.). SerenityOS doesn't even have that.
> Carbon is going nowhere. Time will tell but I am happy to have that on my score card.
I'm not sure I really understand.
If you're saying that it's not more than a temporal blib in the blogoshere I would fully agree!
I also don't see it going anywhere.
Actually for the same reasons like SerenityOS: It does not offer anything special that could justify its existence. I would even put higher bets on CPP2 (even though I'm skeptical there also, but for other reasons; don't see enough traction there).
Thank you for the reply. Truly. To get further into this we would need something more conducive than the comment section.
I wish I understood why you see Redox and SerenityOS as so similar ( other than POSIX of course ). I love Redox but it seems to have very different ambitions and choosing Rust felt like its biggest decision. In terms of innovation, the Redox filesystem seemed to be swinging for the fences the most. The filesystem is the one area that SerenityOS has shown very little interest. I hope Redox is not dead ( though it does “feel” slower ). It would be nice if Relibc got some traction outside of the Redox project as well.
To repeat one point, the hope I have for the mono repo is precisely that it will protect the project from getting trapped in technical stasis and frozen in a wasteland of dependencies. If SerenityOS gets popular, it could be exactly the vehicle for taking some of those academic ideas you cite out of the lab and into the real world. If it is to do this, becoming popular first is why it may succeed where decades of projects have failed. SerenityOS made a change not that long ago which altered what is returned by “main”. The mono repo made that possible.
Oh, and I am not sure Andreas has set himself up as the BDFL. SerenityOS has substantial chunks that have been added without him and I am believe there are already at least a few areas that he does not even have to approve or review. SerenityOS has its own Linus for example and I am pretty sure he can check-in without Andreas now.
Anyway, thank you for the back and forth and I hope you see an OS emerge that interests you. I hear what you are saying.
Was it? It's just one Unix clone over the other. This "shadowboxing" is going on since inception of time (I mean, Unix epoch).
> I find it notable that you went straight for the emotional angle.
It is a result of my impression that there is just nothing on the technical ground that is worth investigating.
The whole project builds up on emotions. What else is there to say?
> I think Linux changed the world […]
Did it? It just prolonged the eternal rule of Unix, imho.
Linux, in some sense, freezed the long standing status quo in time… (Which is btw. part of my "no progress" argument).
> There is nothing else like SerenityOS.
I would say there were already quite of those projects.
Nothing else is more popular than building Unix clones! It's a special feature when a system is not a Unix clone. Not the other way around.
> Your core point is that SerenityOS is too derivative and steals too shamelessly from everybody else.
No, that's not my argument.
It's more that SerenityOS does not add anything new, or even mildly interesting. It's technologically stuck far back in the 70's, like almost all Unix clones.
Even Google, know for their "boring tech" mantra, arrived in the late 80's with their Fuchsia OS.
Actually also MS does have more modern concepts stashed in the drawer. But SerenityOS? No, nothing there.
The point is: When you're anyway rebuilding the world this would be the perfect chance to bring some innovation. Stuff that's laying around in academia for 30 - 50 years, where the main reason imho for not using it is the necessity to rebuild too much things form scratch. Now someone started to rebuild things form scratch. And what? Again the exact same stuff that we have already for 50 years… That's more than disappointing!
But I understand: Trying to be innovative has a high risk of failure and it's at times quite likely going to be frustrating. But the person behind this project wanted some fun distraction. A "game" where he knows for sure that he will win eventually (in the sense of getting something up and running). The reason for this undertaking is that such a "game" is stress relieving and distracting from otherwise hard times.
> Innovating in Linux is more politics than technology […]
I would generalize this to "Innovating is in reality always more politics than technology".
And because everything's a people and economical problem real technological (or also scientific) progress is so hard. It's hard to convince people about new ideas. It's hard to find founding for them.
Having something that will quite likely "succeed" (according to a very narrow and / or shallow definition of success usually) is on the other hand an easy sell.
When you're able to present some shiny stuff (especially quickly) that will attract people.
When then again you come with some "abstract nonsense" and some weird ideas nobody ever tried before it's a very hard sell. (You know, "exceptional claims …" and such).
> SerenityOS can change whatever it wants in the core ecosystem.
One could see this in the opposite way also: Nobody can change there anything without approval form the BDFL, or a complete fork of everything.
That works not even 100% proper for Linux, though it works mostly fine there. But it works mostly fine because of the much narrower scope of Linux.
When you have instead just everything in one place there is not much room for anything that could diverge. Which is in the long run a killer to any substantial change. Ever heard the story that Google's not able to update anything in its core anymore because everything depends on everything?
Also there was a project that was not much different than SerenityOS: Redox OS. It was highly hyped in the beginning. It also tried to rewrite the world. It also was an extreme example of NIH syndrome. (The only difference being that I suspect that the Serenity dude is much more skilled than Redox's "80%-boy"). Where is it now? It had at least some promise of slight innovation (Rust, micro kernel, some nonsense around URLs, etc.). SerenityOS doesn't even have that.
> Carbon is going nowhere. Time will tell but I am happy to have that on my score card.
I'm not sure I really understand.
If you're saying that it's not more than a temporal blib in the blogoshere I would fully agree!
I also don't see it going anywhere.
Actually for the same reasons like SerenityOS: It does not offer anything special that could justify its existence. I would even put higher bets on CPP2 (even though I'm skeptical there also, but for other reasons; don't see enough traction there).