Development alternatives worth exploring?

I really admire what has been attempted in VSTa. It would
be even better if it was a viable applications platform, so let
me pose a speculative question.

Could more progress be made towards a usable
QNX/Plan 9 hybrid by partnering with another project?

Specifically I have in mind the L4/Fiasco project. They have

1- a running system which seems at least superficially similar
     to QNX,
2 - they have a Linux port with X support (although X support may not
    be stable) and
3 - their project seems to still have some life left in it. The URL
    for their project is http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/fiasco/.

[I do not consider hosting Linux/X as the ultimate goal, but it
is a useful intermediate goal.]

Porting the Plan 9 features from VSTa to the new system would
surely be a non-trivial effort but would result in a new
code base with a larger group of contributors working on it.
The joining of resources might just be enough to make the
resulting system a viable, open source, microkernel based
applications platform.

Or as another (probably less feasible) alternative could the salient
features of VSTa be ported into FreeBSD (the Linux developers appear
to be downright hostile to microkernels) allowing it to evolve in new
directions?

Thanks for your time.

Regards,

Michael Werts

----------------------------------------------------------
Michael Werts
E-mail: werts@us.ibm.com
Voice: 408.463.2169 (T/L 543.2169)
Fax: 408.463.2633 (T/L 543.2633)

IBM Corporation · Santa Teresa Lab
555 Bailey Avenue · San Jose · California · 95141
----------------------------------------------------------
Received on Thu Sep 16 14:13:59 1999