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

4 points

17 years ago

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?

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