Hobby OS projects (by alaric)
As a hobby OS developer, I have my own theories about what goes wrong with other hobby OSes.
The biggest failure I see is sheer hubris. Lots of them really think that if they make a technically better OS, people will migrate away from technically inferior OSes towards it, under the mistaken impression that people actually go out and look for the best product. People don't. OSes come bundled with desktop machines, and when that isn't an issue, people who install their own OS usually go for one they're familiar with. The most technically advanced OS currently available for free is probably NetBSD, with FreeBSD being specialised for running standard servers on x86 hardware and OpenBSD being specialised for security applications. Yet few people have heard of them - while millions use Linux, even when the fact that Linux (due to its widespread popularity) has more closed-source software released for it and more drivers for esoteric hardware isn't a factor.
(Personally, I just use Linux to run the Sun JVM (yeah, I know, the BSDs can run it under Linux emulation, but I run a lot of high-load multithreaded stuff that's quite sensitive to emulation layers!), or when I need to use hardware without *BSD drivers (DVB-T receiver cards being the most recent example).)
So with ARGON, I have set my sights low. I'll define the parts of the system needed for posing it as an open-source alternative to Java, based upon more advanced technology. It's a good niche, and one that can expand with time to cover other niches as it grows in popularity.
Sun 16th Jul 2006 12:15 am 
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By James, Thu 18th Dec 2008 @ 11:13 am
So whens the release? 😛 Wouldn't mind testing this thing with a couple of old forth apps I got kicking around on my drive. -Jim