Ask HN : Would people donate to an Operating System research charity?

4 points by Agent101 17y ago ↗ HN

I'm mulling over starting a charity dedicated to helping fund and guide blue sky research into Operating Systems with a reduced total cost of operation compared to Linux and Windows. Time being the cost in Linux's case.

The three factors it would seek to improve

- Increased Usability - Increasing Security - Reduced maintenance time/costs

Some research requires starting from scratch see Coyotos (http://www.coyotos.org/) for example. This is pretty difficult. (http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~vladimir/breviary/os-research.html)

Microsoft does do research into OSes but their goal is to increase profits so there are certain types of research they will not pursue. Reducing the need for the upgrade cycle, for example.

The operation of the charity would be mainly funding postgrad research places and PhDs studentships. If it generated a promising cocktail of technologies that would be worth the cost of switching from established technologies, then it would fund a group to produce an open source OS.

Jonathan Shapiro's decision to join MSFT (http://www.osnews.com/story/21262/Jonathan_Shapiro_of_Coyotos_BitC_Joins_Microsoft) made me think that something like this is necessary.

So what say you hacker news? Is there space for something like this?

2 comments

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asciilifeform 17y ago ↗

How will you decide which projects to fund? The ones with more code to show, having founders with a more prestigious CV, etc. tend to be the ones building on old, broken (i.e. Unix) foundations of the past.

There's no shortage of crackpots who are convinced that they can turn computing upside down if someone were to pay their living expenses for a year or so (disclaimer: this might include myself: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=8 I started entirely from scratch, and with a conscious rejection of burdensome OS traditions, but have practically no free time to work.)

Agent101 17y ago ↗

I'm thinking of a variety of ideas, mainly to do with farming out the decision making process to qualified people who donate. E.g. sending out information to a few people and letting them chose whether to fund it or not.

No point getting too far in advance though, unless I can find potential donors.

I am one of those crackpots as well, I just figured it would be better to try and build an institution for funding OS research than tinker on my own and it whither from lack of people to take it forward.