Re: [jos-general] [TINI OS] Seen it?

[Iain S. <iai...@ya...>]

On Wednesday, August 29, 2001, at 08:06 AM, John Morrison wrote:

> Hi;
>
> Gilbert Carl Herschberger II wrote:
>> Does that sound familiar? It should. Many of the issues we've 
>> discussed on
>> this mailing list have been addressed in TINI OS. You can learn about 
>> it in
>> this new book.

Thanks Gilbert for the pointer.  I did not realize there was a book out 
on it.  I've got a Tini on my desk.  It's a wonderful piece of hardware.

> A long time ago, I suggested chasing JavaOS' tail-lights as a way to
> finesse away all these design discussions.  In just the same way the
> Linus cloned the UNIX kernal API, I suggested we clone the JavaOS APIs.
> The effort would have parallelized better, and we would have cloned a
> debugged (if arguably somewhat over-elaborate, but, hey, that's just my
> opinion) design, and we certainly would've argued less (with the
> exception of underspecified parts of the design).
>
> I don't think this suggestion went over too well.  However, maybe now is
> a good time to revisit this issue.

I would tend to agree.  The only drawbacks to it are:

1) JavaOS was designed before a lot of existing Java technology was and 
the new stuff may be much better than the old stuff.  :)  In particular, 
the device database concept seems to overlap Jini/Jiro/JMX/OSGi/etc and 
is completely non-standard WRT to them.  Updating to a newer standard 
would probably be better.  In addition, their application bundles are 
very MIDP/WebStart/OSGi -ish in idea and implementation.  Using one of 
the newer standards here would also probably be a good idea.  After 
reviewing it again, it seems that most of the JavaOS ideas (except 
perhaps the booting infrastructure) have been recast in modern standard 
extensions...

2) Sun seems very against anything regarding JavaOS.  My company had 
tried to talk to Sun about JavaOS licensing issues and the JavaOS api's 
and received extremely hostile reactions.  I don't know if it is a 
matter of them not wanting to resurrect a bad project or bitterness over 
the idea itself but the response is very unfriendly.  If we were to use 
actual JavaOS API's I think Sun would make our lives pretty miserable.

Do we care about Sun's opinion?

-iain


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