Paramecium
This kernel uses an object-based software architecture which together with instance naming, late binding and explicit overrides enables easy reconfiguration. Determining which components are allowed to reside in the kernel address space is up to a certification authority or one of its delegates. These delegates may include validation programs, correctness provers, and system administrators. The main advantage of certifications is that it can handle trust and sharing in a non-cooperative environment.
Paramecium is a simple and flexible (i.e. adaptable and extendable) operating system used to explore the 
tradeoffs between user processes and kernel boundaries. Services are provided by objects which are named in 
a per process name space. Each process may change its own name space, which boils down to installing new 
services, overriding or interposing existing services, etc. Through the use of code signing a user process may 
put objects into the kernel address space.  The research topic is to explore the various aspects of user/kernel boundaries in the context of the parallel 
programming system Orca. This includes the placement of traditional operating system services and parts of 
the application. Other aspects in which we are also interested are: service interpositions, performance 
monitoring, and user level network access combined with predicate network address filtering. 

The project is akin to SPIN, Oberon, Exo, Spring, etc. but differs from these in the sense that it uses traditional 
techniques (i.e. uses objects as granularity for extensions combined with naming), and it uses a simple 
micro-kernel architecture with multiple protection domains without trying to virtualize hardware. 

The current state of the project is that we have written a kernel running on a sun4m architecture (Sparc) and are 
currently writing down its design. We are also working on a simple orca run-time system which takes advantage 
of the extensibility provided by the kernel. As a spin-off we have written a SparcClassic (sun4m) Architecture 
Simulator which emulates the full hardware and prom and runs our kernel, Amoeba and SunOS. It is used for 
debugging and performance evaluations. 
 

PEACE (Process Execution And Communication Environment) (GMD FIRST)
PEACE is a family of operating systems with a truly object-oriented design developed at GMD FIRST. Emphasis is laid on subjects as performance, configurability and portability. It is the native operating system for the MANNA computer, a massively parallel computer facilitating a high-performance interconnection network. Ports to SunOS, FreeBSD and Parix were made and expand the scope of this system to other parallel computers as well as to workstation networks.

     Through an object-oriented counterpart to RPC (Remote Procedure Calls), called ROI (Remote Object Invocation), a powerfull means of location transparent communication is available. The ROI-tools and libraries allow for distribution of data-objects, and location transparent relationships between objects with little more than a few annotations to standard C++ class-definitions. 
     Originally part of research activities for massively parallel systems, PEACE showed potential to suit other demands as well, and thus, became basis for several projects at FIRST and other places.
    

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Pick(outdated) 
Multitasking/Multiuser-System Pick. Based on a multi-user database-system.

Plan 9 (Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center)
Plan 9 is a new computer operating system developed at Bell Labs. It is a distributed system. In the most general configuration, it uses three kinds of components: terminals that sit on users' desks, file servers that store permanent data, and CPU servers that provide faster CPUs, user authentication, and network gateways. One of the interesting facets of Plan 9 is that it exports a file-system interface to essentially all system services.  
Named for the science-fiction cult movie "Plan 9 From Outer Space," developed since the mid-80s (??) by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, Dave Presotto and Phil Winterbottom, with support from Dennis Ritchie. Distributed computing in a networked, client-server environment. The set of resources available to applications is transparently made accessible everywhere in the distributed system, so that it is irrelevant where the applications are actually running. Has no  UNIX code. Controls the computer that maintains parts of the Bell Labs World Wide Web service, including the prototype WWW 800-number directory service, and has already been licensed to some 200 colleges and universities. In its most general configuration, it uses three kinds of components: terminals that sit on users' desks, file servers that store permanent data, and other servers that provide faster central-processing units, user authentication, and network gateways. 
     Its commercial successor is  Inferno 

POSIX® (Portable Operating System Interface) 
IEEE Standard Portable Operating System Interface for Computer Environments, IEEE Std 1003.1-1988. 

Most UNIX systems today are POSIX compliant. Microsoft's Windows NT is also POSIX compliant. Unfortunately, given the manufacturer's documentation, it can be difficult to distinguish system-specific features from those features defined by POSIX. The POSIX Programmer's Guide is especially helpful if you are writing programs that must run on multiple UNIX platforms or UNIX and Windows NT. This guide also helps you convert existing UNIX programs for POSIX compliance. 
 

Protection and Sharing through Shared Libraries (University of Notre Dame)

Protected Shared Libraries (PSLs) are based on the observation that shared libraries, with some modifications, could be used to implement user-level OS services with adequate protection and many degrees of sharing. Furthermore the dynamic nature of loadable shared libraries can be extended to provide a high degree of flexibility in the implementation of user-level services. Protected Shared Libraries add two different dimensions to the usual notion of shared libraries - protection domains and multiple forms of sharing through Shared Address Libraries.

Puma and relatives (Sandia National Laboratory)
The Puma operating system targets high-performance applications on tightly coupled distributed memory architectures. It is a descendant of SUNMOS.

Public Domain 
Free Software is the age honored term of Stallman. By incorporating "software" it limits itself to -- software,  even though the FSF Copyleft is also being applied to music (Free Music Philosophy) 
     Open Source is the shift in terminology that Raymond effected in January 1998 (earlier versions of his "Bazaar" still talked about Free Software.) 
     Public Domain seems to me the oldest in use not only in respect to software, but also with a much wider range of meanings, e.g. in agriculture: industrial hybrid seed that produces infertile crop in order to force the farmer to buy again next season -- of course, sugared with all the high-tech appeal of improved yield and quality compared to the natural stuff -- can be undstood as a kind of copy protection. Fenced in by the whole arsenal of patent and copyright (??) law. Patent cops checking for the whereabouts and usage of their companies seeds, seriously (Sounds like MS policing their customer's harddisks?). The Open Source model would be what farmers had always done: saving some of the harvest for next year's sowing, sharing seed, cross-breeding it (improving the open source code?) -- until the chemical industry discovered our food production as a marvelous market, and privatized an open standard (Sounds like what MS is doing to Java?). 
     Is there a US-American aversion against embracing the term Public because it implies "state", which doesn't go down well with a neo-liberal free-marketism?? (Barbrook, Californian Ideology) 

There is a strong sense of the fundamental immorality of access restrictions to knowledge, information, learning, culture, wisdom at the very basis of western, modern, democratic civilization. At its origin in the 17th century, when a bourgoisie formed and especially scientists, writers, scholars and artists demanded education and free access to the semiophores stored in private collections of the rich and mighty, the first public libraries (1602 Oxford, 1609 Milano, 1620 Rome) and public museums (1683 Oxford, 1734 Rome, 1743 Florence) were created (Pomian 1998: 77f.). 
     An inherent contradiction of the 'information society', i.e. a society based on information technology and information capitalism, is that it provides the means for knowledge to be shared freely, and at the same time turns Cultural Memory into one of its central commodities. A pre-history of the 'information society' would show how the private ownership to exploitation rights on 'intellectual property' was continuously expanded.(In the USA the period was extended from originally 14 to 28 to now 50 years after the death of the author. Other countries have similar periods. Note the difference in concepts of Goetheian 'Urheberrecht' and Anglosaxon 'copyright'.) Nowadays, works become accessible - and this is the crucial point: not only to consumption but also to appropriation, i.e. to Living Culture, to improvement, to extension, to creative hacking - only when they are dead long enough so not too many people care anymore. (The Project Gutenberg is founded on this mechanism of expired copyrights.) The alternatives to private, always potentially monopolistic, exploitation of Cultural Memory can summarily be placed under the heading of Public Domain. World Cultural Heritage, whatever the term might contain, certainly should be accessible to all, without a price or any other restriction on copying and using. 
     Public Domain is a concept that has grown into a variety of models. Librarians want to see their storehouses of knowledge freely accessible to the public, and in recent years have fought for the continuation and extention of fair-use, which allows students and researchers access to copyrighted or patented materials without paying intellectual property rights (see the Copyright & Fair Use Site at Stanford). The US legal system knows the institution of Eminent Domain, under which a federal agency can "condemn" a piece of property and convert it to public use for the benefit of the greater community, while providing monetary compensation to the property owner. In analogy, Public Domain has been suggested as model serving public interest, preventing monopolies, and rewarding developers. Intellectual objects that might be classified under this special category as being of vital public interest include chemical formulas, such as possible cures for cancer or AIDS, and software, such as operating system source code. A more moderate system already in operation is compulsory licencing where the government grants access to licences and copyrights for a royalty rate fixed by government or law (e.g. for textbooks and pharmaceuticals in the Philippines, see Roberto Verzola, #Cyberlords: The Rentier Class of the Information Sector, Philippines 1998). In the field of computer software, Shareware (under various schemes, such as free trial periods,  free distribution, voluntary payments, etc.) and Freeware are common models. 
  GNU is a project of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), set up by Richard Stallman in reaction to the commercial closure of  UNIX by NT&T. Software and books under the GNU General Public License (GPL), aka Copyleft, may be used freely by anybody, may be shared freely with others, and the software may be freely modified because the source code is included in the distribution. Users agree to the license condition that the sourcecode may not be removed and that it is illegal to distribute the improved versions except as free software. Linus Torvald's UNIX derivative for Intel computers, Linux, which now gains popularity also in business and administration as a reliable and free alternative to  MS-Windows is distributed under GPL. 
  

Free Software Foundation aka GNU (Gnu's Not Unix)  
http://www.fsf.org aka http://www.gnu.org   
   
 

The Perl community's "Artistic License''  
http://language.perl.com/misc/Artistic.htm  

Example of FreeBSD's more relaxed than GPL license  
http://www.debian.org/misc/bsd.license  
 

OpenSource.Org   
http://www.opensource.org/   
     The Open Source Definition (License) 
     http://www.opensource.org/osd.htm 
     A History of the Open Source effort 
     http://www.opensource.org/history.htm 
    
  

COSHER = Completely Open Source, Headers, Engineering, and Research  
"By using COSHER software, we are making a statement that we prefer Computer Science over Computer Secrecy. Science supports the basic principles of peer review, and a continued development and advancement of software principles, and principles that we build on top of the software." 
http://wearcam.org/cosher.htm 

Debian-based Open Hardware Certification Program  
http://www.openhardware.org/ 

  
Union for the Public Domain  
http://www.public-domain.org/  

Apache  
http://www.apache.org/  
     On the deal between Apache and IBM: ""So let me get this straight," one IBM lawyer said. "We're  
     doing a deal with . . . a Web site?" Yes, and the Web site was setting the terms of the deal." (Josh  
     McHugh in Forbes) 
     http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0810/6203094a.htm 

http://www.mozilla.org/   
    
     Netscape introduced its next-generation browser, dubbed Gecko. It is the first product based  
     on contributions from outside developers since Netscape released its Navigator source code to 
     the public.  It debuted commercially in early 1999. 
     # 

WebReview, Special Issue on Open Source  
http://webreview.com/wr/pub/98/04/10  

O'Reilly: Open Source Ressources  
http://opensource.oreilly.com/  
  

Forbes on Hackers: Josh McHugh, A band of rebels think that software's secrets should be as free as the air we breathe. Don't sell Microsoft short—but don't underestimate the rebels, either. 
"Liberated software has become an intellectual Olympics, where some of the world's top engineering minds compete—not for venture capital, but for impressing their peers."   
     http://www.forbes.com/forbes/98/0810/6203094a.htm 
 
  
  

 
 

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