Weird Operating Systems

Unix and Friends

Today we tend to take Linux for granted. From servers to phones to routers, the linux kernel is nearly ubiquitous. But starting from the humble original linux announcement and even earlier, we can see a family of open source operating system. Their evolution and continued development today can teach us a lot about open source software, too.

The slightly less humble initial announcement of the GNU project predates the linux announcement by a number of years, but when linux was announced there was no free kernel widely available. minix was not available under a free license until later and existing BSDs were living under the chilling effect of a lawsuit. Eventually linux matured and was released under the GPL version 2, with Torvalds later stating: “Making Linux GPL’d was definitely the best thing I ever did.”

Hurd

Hurd is technically the official kernel of the GNU project though it has some colorful history. It’s sort of unclear what would have happened had a usable kernel been produced before Linus came on the scene. Regardless, the hurd project is still kicking.

BSDs

One interesting thing about the BSDs is that their development style remains more conservative. Thinking about the famous “The Cathedral and the Bazaar, the BSDs are developed in a much more cathedral-like fashion. Checkout wikipedia for more.

Minix

Minix has been around as an educational tool for sometime now, but minix 3 aims to be more than just pedagogical. The minix wikipedia page provides some history.

Plan 9

Plan 9 was written by many of the same people at bell labs that gave us unix. Plan 9 was intended to be a distributed operating system. We can see some of the ideas in Linux today with a more robust procfs.

Redox

Look down a list of open source operating and you’ll see one common feature. They’re all written in C!

redox aims to change that by taking on the brave goal of writing a new operating system in a new programming language.

Clones of Proprietary Systems

Embedded Operating Systems