[cap-talk] POLA focus seen as counter productive

[Jed Donnelley]

At 11:21 PM 6/11/2007, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
...

Thanks for all the detailed and relevant information Jonathan.
There is enough that I'm afraid I will have to spend quite
a bit of time reading before I'm likely to find myself in
a position to contribute anything more positive to any of the
performance related topics.

However, I did want to feed something back regarding this:

At 11:21 PM 6/11/2007, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>On Mon, 2007-06-11 at 19:51 -0700, Jed Donnelley wrote:
> > Of course on this list it would seem that our focus should be POLA.
>
>You know, I used to feel very strongly about that, and I have concluded
>that we were wrong.

which may be of general interest to the list.

>By focusing on building the ideal POLA system, we have spent 15 years
>not delivering anything (for end users) at all. In the process, we have
>given competitors an opportunity to build very strong positions. Worse,
>we have given them time to think about how to confuse the issue.
>
>In hindsight, we would have done much better to deliver something
>quickly and then iterate on its design and architecture.

What sort of delivery do you believe would have been effective?

I don't believe there is much of anything that could have been
done to make capability computing at the OS level sell after
Unix and Windows climbed to ascendency.  In those early days
the concern with viruses and such wasn't even an issue, so it
seems there wasn't even any potential practical benefit.

Even with the issue of Trojan Horses now quite a practical
one, I still don't see any significant path forward for
object/capability constructs at the OS level.

However, the network level is a completely different story.
There I don't really see any effective alternative to something
like object/capabilities - particularly to enable resource
sharing between organizations.

One thing about these sorts of issues, there is always time
to use hindsight for moving forward.  With my "hindsight" as
I note, my best hope for progress is in the network area - which
I hope will eventually trickle down to the OS level.

Where do you see the most hope for progress?

--Jed  http://www.webstart.com/jed-signature.html