[cap-talk] [cap-conf] OS juncture papers

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

I am replying only to cap-talk, because this thread is not appropriate
for cap-conf.

On Thu, 2008-02-28 at 15:02 -0800, Jed Donnelley wrote:
> I wonder if somebody could share some thoughts or pointers
> to discussion about application support on other capability
> systems and it's relationship to GNU or more OS "independent"
> software development?

You are surely aware of PLASH, but I think you are asking the wrong
question.

Your question tacitly assumes that a desktop-style computing environment
(e.g. Windows or Linux) is the goal by which we should measure
capability-based computing systems. I disagree. There is a large and
growing body of embedded systems that are slowly morphing into
application platforms. None of these have a substantial backwards
compatibility problem, and there is still opportunity to build good
systems there.

As to desktop applications, there has been a significant shift. 10 years
ago, there simply *weren't* any open source desktop applications worth
mentioning. Today, a comprehensive suite of tools exists in the form of
OpenOffice, and that suite could be re-engineered.

shap