Microsoft Singularity Now "Open" Source

Alex_Ionescu writes "Microsoft's Singularity operating system (covered previously by Slashdot) is now open to the public for download, under a typical Microsoft academic, non-commercial license. Inside is a fully compilable and bootable version of what could be the basis for the future of Windows, or maybe simply an experiment to demonstrate .NET's capabilities. Singularity, if you'll recall, has gained wide interest from researchers and users alike, by claiming to be a fully managed code kernel (with managed code drivers and applications as well), something that would finally revolutionize the operating system research arena. The project is available on CodePlex."

Stability?

[spectrokid (660550)]

If this is super-stable-hacker-resistant then there must be some uses where performance is not really an issue: ATM's, Kiosks,... Does anybody know what software exists for this thing? Does it run IE?

Re:Stability?

[wiggles (30088)]

Ars Technica says it all. [arstechnica.com]

This OS doesn't really run any applications at all. It's not intended for commercial use, and will not be the next Windows. All it is, is a test bed for future technologies. Think of it as an IT equivalent of a concept car. It doesn't really run, but it's nifty to look at to get ideas for future projects.

Re:Stability?

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

I looked at Singluarity a while ago, and all of the 'innovations' I saw had been in JNode [jnode.org] years earlier. Since JNode is LGPL and actually capable of running (Java) applications, what is the attraction of Singularity?

Re:Stability?

[sgt scrub (869860)]

what is the attraction of Singularity

IMHO it has a company behind it with enough money to market it. The reason to market it is so the technology gained from the people "learning from it" can be usurped by the marketer. btw. thanks for the link.

Re:Stability?

[Eli Gottlieb (917758)]

[W]hat is the attraction of Singularity?

Why don't you walk into the event horizon and find out?

Re:Stability?

[suggsjc (726146)]

This OS doesn't really run any applications at all

Which is the key to having a perfectly stable OS!

wharrrt?

[russ1337 (938915)]

In today's news

"Microsoft releases open source operating system"

"Mans head explodes from intense confusion after reading news article about Microsoft releasing Open Source OS"

Re:wharrrt?

[sm62704 (957197)]

"Mans head explodes from intense confusion after reading news article about Microsoft releasing Open Source OS"

Minor nit: you misspelled "Asplodes" [uncyclopedia.org]. From the link:

Use By Noobs
N00bs use the term asplode as a form of 13375p33k. For example:
Non-Noob: Lol I pwnt u with a rocket launcher!
Noob: Oh teh noes!!! I am asplode!!11!eleventyone!!
Non-Noob: Wtf?

A splode: the command prompt
Micro$oft secretly enabled a splode as a DOS command. Opening the command prompt and entering C:\asplode would start a countdown which would, when finished, cause your hard drive to a splode. Entering D:\asplode made the CD drive a splode. And entering A:\asplode would would make the floppy drive a splode. If you have a B:\ drive, you can a splode it by entering B:\asplode. Usually this makes the 5.25" floppy drive a splode! If you enter this into a Linux shell, it a splodes all computers within a 5-mile radius that run Window$. If you loved your PC, you would have entered this DOS command.

(Note: drive letter may vary between PCs.)

It is unknown whether the Singularity OS incorporates this useful command, but it is assumed that a singularity asplosion would release vast quantities of something not real nice.

Sometimes tin foil is just a cigar

[fm6 (162816)]

It's an attempt to keep developers from even looking at Linux.

Give me a break. OK, MS is evil, but not everything they do is part of a grand conspiracy. Nobody is going to be stupid enough to stick with Windows just because MS is playing with a research OS that's not even backward compatible with existing software. And nobody at MS is stupid enough to think that anybody will be that stupid.

This is just another blue sky project from the Microsoft Research, a division that is tasked with coming out with cool stuff without regard to commercial viability. Every big high-tech company has such a division. My own employer, Sun, has Sun Labs, which is always coming out with interesting stuff that mostly has nothing to do with our business model. I think it's mainly a prestige thing, to convince folks that you're a cutting-edge company.

Software Isolated Processes

[parvenu74 (310712)]

Singularity, if you'll recall, has gained wide interest from researchers and users alike, by claiming to be a fully managed code kernel (with managed code drivers and applications as well), something that would finally revolutionize the operating system research arena.

The impression I got by looking at what was known about the project a year ago is that it was of lesser interest that the OS was written in managed code and it was far more interesting that they had solved some problems of inter-process communication in a micro-kernel OS. As you can read at Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:

Singularity is a microkernel operating system; however, unlike most historical microkernels, the different components do not run in separate address spaces (processes). Instead, there is only a single address space in which "Software-Isolated Processes" (SIP) reside. Each SIP has its own data and code layout, and is independent from other SIPs. These SIPs behave like normal processes, but do not require the overhead penalty of task-switches. Protection in this system is provided by a set of invariants, such as the memory-invariant which states there will be no cross-references (or memory pointers) between two SIPs. Communication between SIPs occur via higher order communication channels managed by the operating system. These rules are checked during the installation phase of the application, and must be fulfilled in order for Singularity to allow the installation (note: in Singularity, installation is managed by the operating system).

The promise of Singularity, as I understood it, was the possibility of constructing an O/S kernel with all of the modularity advantages of a microkernel without all of the process communication issues typical to this kernel type.

Re:Software Isolated Processes

[smallfries (601545)]

It sounds like a very interesting project. The idea that screams out from the wiki summary is static analysis and verification. There is a really good rundown in one of the wiki links [microsoft.com]. The really big difference from previous work is not just the use of managed code, but splitting the entire system into either trusted, or verified code. The trusted component is a tiny core, which they are working on verifying. The design of the rest of the kernel and the SIPs is a good one: instead of doing arbitrary verification, change the language design so that you can only write verifiable code. Then see how much of an O/S you can write. The progress is astounding.

For the IPC they have made some strange choices, receiving is synchronous (as in process calculi) but sending is asynchronous. As they are writing the lowest level parts (such as the schedular) in this code it may be an implementation difficulty with synchronous sends. The cheapness of the IPC seems to be routed in the transfer of ownership that communication implies. In essence you can't alias, you can only pass by value - but the low-level runtime can modify this to pass more efficiently by reference because it can verify there are no dangling references. This would (if it works over a large enough code base) solve the performance issue with IPC in a microkernel. It is (as another reply pointed out) similar to providing the semantics of heavy-weight communication to the programmer in a way that can be implemented with cheap co-routines.

Having done some (well, little) work in this area I'm really impressed by what they've achieved already.

Re:Software Isolated Processes

[parvenu74 (310712)]

This sounds *really* cool actually, but I wonder if anything will ever come of it on the desktop?

Perhaps in Windows 7. Like I replied on another sub-thread of this discussion, Singularity isn't intended to ever go to market. Rather it's a breeding and proving ground for advanced concepts that might find their way into the main Windows code base at some time in the future. I think it's something like the advanced technology/racing teams inside of the major car makers who create interesting ways of solving difficult problems: some of these advanced concepts (like ABS, traction control, etc) from the racing and research teams find their way into the cars we actually drive on a day to day basis.

It's open source because...

[Gabest (852807)]

... they couldn't make it closed. Being written in a managed language means it's easily reversable.

Re:It's open source because...

[Ctrl-Z (28806)]

Have you ever seen an obfuscator? Run your code through one of those and see how easily reversible it is.

Re:It's open source because...

[ushering05401 (1086795)]

IIRC last Fall's 2600 had a basic intro to reversing obfuscated code (using Java example I think).

There are several websites out there that deobfuscate code in realtime to advertise their services... if I was actually interested in the issue I might still have a link, but you will have to google if you want to research this further.

The basic Visual Studio toolset has everything you need to reverse any managed code manually, obfuscated or not, providing you are willing to put in the time.

Anyhow, C# currently pays for my meals, so I'm not trolling here... but be careful about making assumptions about the privacy of any managed code that you release. Hell, same goes for any code, the 'managed' aspect just lower the bar for crackers a bit.

Re:It's open source because...

[clintp (5169)]

Is there a difference between "managed code" and "interpreted code"? They seem like two words for the same thing.

IANA Microsoft Language Lawyer, but this is what I think the distinctions are:

Managed Code is code intended for a virtual machine (like MS's CLR or Sun's JVM) that abstracts the hardware instructions away. Instead, the instruction set for the virtual machine is used. The Virtual Machine will provide "devices" and "memory" in a (hopefully) safe and portable way and take care of all of the dirty hardware business itself. Some VM's will actually take the VM instruction and turn it into actual hardware instructions as it's being executed (JIT) for speed, but that's not necessary.

Which isn't to say that Managed Code is a new thing: The USCD-Pascal p-code machine is remembered fondly by many, and the Zork games ran on a Z-Machine.

Interpreted code is a little stickier because it's been around a lot longer and has picked up some additional meanings. It can mean anything from the "Managed Code" described above to parsing (and possibly re-parsing) text lines of BASIC as they're run to process them in a giant state machine which "runs" the program.

Usually, interpreted code implies that there's no abstracted fully virtual machine underneath running the code, but possibly just a big jump-table pointing at native assembly-language (hand-coded or compiled) routines. Perl and Microsoft BASIC (basis of many of the old 8-bit BASICs) are two examples of interpreted code.

Quick, Slashdot!

[Goaway (82658)]

Spin this into something bad! Your honour is on the line!

All I want to know is ...

[garett_spencley (193892)]

will it run Linux ?

No spin required: it's kernel Erlang

[Morgaine (4316)]

Singularity also introduces a software-isolated process (SIP) mechanism, which makes it possible for lightweight processes to coexist safely with their own sealed code environments in the same memory space. All communication between SIPs is conducted through channels. The use of SIPs effectively eliminates the overhead traditionally incurred by context-switching in conventional microkernels.

In other words, Microsoft finally discovers Erlang [erlang.org].

While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the guys at Redmond lost the habit of inventing anything new a long time ago, the above concepts have been in industrial use in Erlang-powered PTT exchanges since the dawn of time.

Oh wow!

[AKAImBatman (238306)]

Managed code! Look at that! Microsoft has managed to prove...

What OSS developers already proved [jnode.org] years ago. :-/

Actually, I'm still pretty happy about this. Regardless of whether Microsoft was first or not, they're going to manage to market the concept far better than a conglomeration of OSS developers ever could. (Sorry, guys!) If everything goes well, perhaps the public impression of managed code being "nothing but an interpreter" can finally get turned around and Computer Science can keep moving forward. :-)

I love the name

[sm62704 (957197)]

However, considering that Vista has become something of a "black hole" for them, I think they were a little late with the "singularity" moniker. Is the next Windows going to be called "Event Horizon?"

That black hole has surely sucked in a few dollars of mine, and sucked in a lot of little companies that were pulled apart by Microsoft's huge gravity well.

-mcgrew
(Apologies for the lack of journals lately)

What?

[Robber Baron (112304)]

Singularity? Did Ballmer finally disappear up his own ass and create one?

It's a nice system. Is this abandonment?

[Animats (122034)]

Very nice. It's sad, though, that Microsoft is making it available as open source, because that means it's not going to become a Microsoft product.

Singularity is an interesting system. Most of the individual ideas aren't new, but the combination of them is well chosen. It's a message passing microkernel, like VM and QNX, the OSs that actually work reliably. The storage management and of enforcement of process separation at compile time comes from the ALGOL compiler for the Burroughs 5500, circa 1960, for example. They recognized the problem of interaction between interprocess communication and the scheduler and dealt with it; QNX probably has a better solution, but the one in Singularity is OK. Singularity tries a bit too hard to avoid interprocess copying; so did Mach, and it made things worse.

There's a reasonable design-by-contract language. The language knows about marshalling for interprocess communication, which encourages its use. That's borrowed from Mesa. In most languages, a subroutine call is much easier to code than an interprocess call, which encourages bloat of individual processes.

Drivers aren't in the kernel and aren't trusted, although drivers that can do DMA still present a security problem. This is a problem with insecure PC hardware; IBM mainframe channels have DMA that goes through MMU checking. That could be fixed, especially since most new peripherals are on USB or FireWire ports. Add-on boards are on the way out.

Makes me wish I was still doing OS R&D.

Microsoft hate

[electrosoccertux (874415)]

I'm afraid stuff like this is reducing my hate of MS. For several reasons, I am finding MS products less and less frustrating.

1). Open sourcing weird stuff like this.
2). Silverlight is pretty good.
3). I disabled UAC in Vista. Now Vista is just like XP, but it has a prettier (albeit inconsistent at times) UI.
4). Realizing that as much as I may like free as in freedom with Linux, in XP, my stuff just works, and it's fast and snappy and doesn't get bogged down (of course I'm not doing stupid stuff like using IE visiting sketchy websites that install things). It works great for all my games, etc. Solid OS; I just had to get over my Linux vigilatism to notice it.
5). I just found the speach recognition built into Vista 2 nights ago. For just about everything but typing, it works flawlessly. As much as I love my mouse; sitting back, relaxing with both hands comfortably unbound from a keyboard and mouse, feels absolutely wonderful. So instead of clicking minimize/maximize/close, alt+tab'ing until you see the window you want, clicking start, etc; you just say into your headset "Minimize" "Maximize" or the name of the window you want to use. So to change focus back to Firefox, I would say "Mozilla Firefox". Then you can say things like "Bookmarks" and it opens the menu for your bookmaks. Say the name of the bookmark and it selects it, then "ok" or "enter" to open it. If you've got several bookmarks it thinks you're saying, it highlights all of them with a transparent bar that you can see through, and places a number in the middle of that bar. So if I say "Slashdot", it highlights the 8 slashdot bookmarks I have, and then I say "7" and it opens the one under the bar labelled "7". "Scroll Down", "Scroll down 10", "Press control w" to close a tab. If you have a list of sites you usually like to go to, and have them all bookmarked (for me they're all in the bookmarks toolbar folder), then browsing your favorite sites that you check daily is easy. "GM [gmail]" "Reddit" etc. Since I have all these bookmarks on the toolbar, it automatically finds them and clicks them. When you're surfing the net, just say the name of the link on the page and it opens it for you.

The Start Menu works nicely too. Just say "Start" and then the name of the program you want to open. Then it opens it. If it thinks there's several things you could be referring to, it shows these in the search results pane and uses the same number scheme to select which one you want. You can access windows here as well; after saying "Start" say "Show numbers" and then the number of the window you want to restore.

This is the same tech they're putting in Ford/Lincoln/Mercuries for the GPS and music system that you've been seeing commercials for lately. After using the Vista version for just about 30 minutes, I've quickly gotten used to it; the commands are very intuitive. Gotta say it's really cool stuff. Yes I know OSX has had this since who knows when, but meh, OSX can't play my games. It feels much closer to what I'm thinking I want to do, because there's no physical motion besides just speaking what I want to do and it does it. Seems like they're progressing towards the synergy between brain and computer control very nicely.

Microsoft will never be able to do microkernel

[IGnatius T Foobar (4328)]

Microsoft has proven time and time again that they don't have the discipline to do a properly layered operating system.

When they had OS/2 available to them, they switched back to DOS and stuffed everything into Win16.

Then when they had the original NT microkernel available to them, they stuffed everything into the Win32 layer, where it didn't belong.

Do you really believe Microsoft when they say, again, "This time we're going to design it properly" ??

Please fix the title!

[Omnifarious (11933)]

Won't someone fix the title? It's just plain wrong. A non-commercial license is not Open Source.

Doesn't quality

[HermMunster (972336)]

That doesn't even remotely resemble open source. It is NOT open source.

This is Microsoft's attempt to redefine what Open Source means. It is an aberration of their "embrace, extend, extinguish". They are trying to confuse the market into a non-understanding of what open source means.

That license is not even close to the GPL. People who develop for open source need to understand and spread the word that this is simply a matter of intentional obfuscation of the ideals behind open source and what it attempts to achieve. Giving up is giving in, so don't give up on spreading word.

*yawn*

[WhiteWolf666 (145211)]

Frankly, this is stupid.

The "vaunted" MS Research team has put out a "concept" OS that doesn't run _any_ applications, and cannot be used for any commercial purpose, and has no indications that it can be licensed. It's only claim to fame is that its an MS OS; there have been 100% managed code [jnode.org] OSs before.

Just last month Arstechnica [arstechnica.com] had an article about two similar OSs, except they are written entirely in C#, without the C++ HAL in Singularity.

Both are REAL opensource. As is jnode.

In short, who gives a flaming f**k? As usual, MS is a day late and a dollar short, which is impressive considering that the "research team" working on singularity seems to be 30-40 people.

Re:

[Carrot007 (37198)]

Congratulations you pointed out something that was clearly not in the summary. Thank you for a worthwhile addition to the discussion. Your mother must be proud.

Re:!free

[SQLGuru (980662)]

I think you mean:

gscb_hungarian_use = FALSE
(global static constant boolean)

Layne

Re:!free

[moosesocks (264553)]

Can't you look past your own ideology to see that this is actually a remarkably good thing, even if it possibly could be better.

Re:!free

[Hatta (162192)]

It's not an ideological point, it's a practical one. Why should anyone spend any time learning and working with this tool if their efforts cannot be used commercially? It's not a bad thing that they allow people to look at their source, but it's hardly a "remarkably good thing" either.

Re:!free

[alan_dershowitz (586542)]

Why should anyone spend any time learning and working with this tool if their efforts cannot be used commercially?

Two reasons: Because it is, allegedly, a highly modern kernel design that (I've read) implements a next-generation security model that is conceptually too different to be bolted on conventional modular monolithic kernels. With an academic, noncommercial license you can use it to to learn about kernels. If you're not interested in or learning about kernels, only potentially using them, then yeah, I concede your point. However, secondly, an academic noncommercial license to the source doesn't preclude Microsoft selling an OS based on that kernel commercially, in which case having the source does have practical value for programmers even if it cannot be modified.

Re:!free

[Timothy Brownawell (627747)]

My understanding is that the security model is actually pretty old, and has been around since at least 1979 [upenn.edu].

Re:!free

[C3c6e6 (766943)]

I'm sorry but if you can't modify the code and redistribute it yourself, then I don't consider the source to be open. Still, I agree, it could be useful as an educational tool.

Re:!free

[peragrin (659227)]

your right. Now compare Minix and Linux. One has a license for you too look at the source code and the other one allows you to actually use the source code and ideas in it.

It's not Open Source until you can use it. BSD, MIT, Apache, GPL, allow you to actually use the code.

Re:!free

[Azarael (896715)]

That's also fine, until Microsoft decides to go after you once you've reviewed the source, but happen to work on a parallel product, say Linux. This may be a cynical analysis, but the fact remains that this could be a trap, and slashdot previously covered similar problems with the source code releases of XP to Gov't, etc staff.

Exactly, it's a trap

[Bozdune (68800)]

the fact remains that this could be a trap

If you are a large entity, revealing your source via restricted license has become one of the best ways to cause your ideas to be protected, since you can argue that anyone else who had access to your source code, and then subsequently wrote something competitive, has "stolen your intellectual property." Even if you don't win the case, or the case is weak to begin with (as was SCO's), at the very least you can make a lot of trouble for a competitor, mire them in an expensive multi-year court case, and cause Casper Milquetoast prospects to avoid a "possibly infringing" solution.

This could very well be Microsoft duplicity at its finest. It is built-in protection for Windows 7. Let's assume that software patents are overthrown by the SCOTUS, Microsoft's SCO friends die the zombie death they so richly deserve, and that Microsoft is forced, kicking and screaming, to obey standards by the EU and others -- in other words, all of Microsoft's existing weapons to maintain its monopoly position are defused. This strategy becomes a key defensive position.

Do not look at this code. You must be able to answer, "I never saw it," under oath, if you ever expect to build something competitive.

Re:!free

[IamTheRealMike (537420)]

Singularity and Linux are so completely different that the chances of successfully prosecuting somebody for "stealing code" or even ideas is zero. Not only is Singularity written in a custom derivative of C# rather than C, but it has very different concepts of what a process is, what a kernel is, how system components communicate, and so on.

I, for one, am very happy to hear this and will definitely be checking it out. Singularity is probably the most interesting research OS out there right now, in multiple dimensions. The main challenge they have to tackle next is one that most microkernels never really reached (because their performance was too poor to make it worth bothering with) - once a component does fail, how can you rewind the system to a safe recovery point? I emailed the Singularity guys about this and got back a very nice reply, which basically said "we don't know, that's still a research problem we need to investigate".

Anyway. Good on MS Research. Let's see if anything interesting comes of this. It doesn't have to be useful, mind you, just interesting.

Re:free is important to have more OS devs

[nuzak (959558)]

Everything you do on this project, whether just asking a question on a forum or posting a small patch will give MS more momentum, and takes away the same momentum from true free software. So you are not only giving your time away for free, you are also adding value too a commercial research project.

Microsoft finally innovates something, and this is the response.

Of course people who are actually interested don't much care for your tribalist attitude. Hey maybe in 20 more years the open source world can reinvent another Unix.

Re:!free

[pak9rabid (1011935)]

open source = source code is made available
free software = source code is not only made available, but you are free to use that source however you wish, assuming you abide by the guidelines presented in the free software license, assuming there are any

there is a thing called the open source definition

[erlehmann (1045500)]

http://opensource.org/docs/osd [opensource.org]

also, repost is repost [slashdot.org]

*Who* has an agenda?

[mkcmkc (197982)]

Your agenda notwithstanding, the term "Open Source" has a specific technical meaning that most of us understand. The title is misleading in that regard.

I'm somewhat agnostic on the question of whether or not Open Source is a good thing, but it does us no good to have someone call any license their cat coughs up "Open Source".

Re:!free

[zotz (3951)]

"open source = source code is made available"

http://www.opensource.org/ [opensource.org]

They may have coinded tghe term, they certainly promoted it and made it polular. They disagree.

all the best,

drew

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]

Open Source != open source

[ShatteredArm (1123533)]

It's kinda one of those things where a term with a very obvious semantic meaning was hijacked, politicized, and became something entirely different. It may have been the case that at one point, before all the lawyering or whatever, availability of source code actually meant you could do whatever you want with it. Thus, "open source" implied free use, redistribution, etc. And clearly, people who support Open Source support those ideals, even if open source code does not necessarily imply that anymore.

It's kinda like Democratic vs. democratic. One is a political party with lobbyists, fake politicians, etc., and the other is a type of system where the people make the decisions.

Re:Noun VS Adjective

[HermMunster (972336)]

I don't agree, this is Opened Source, not Open Source. The definition is the one used by those that created it to begin with.

Microsoft stated last year that they'd be killing Open Source. This is an attempt by them to redefine the term. We had this discussion last year about how Microsoft's use of the term hurt the definition and how business would react to those terms. Our discussions mean nothing to Microsoft, so they have simply continued in hopes that the legions of ill informed could further their redefinition. History is written by those who win the war. This is an attempt by Microsoft to win the war.

Open Source is precisely what the Opensource.org says it is.

Microsoft has simply opened the source. It is not Open Source in any remote way.

Re:NOT Open Source

[A.K.A_Magnet (860822)]

Fuck off. I'm really tired of you OSS fascists. You don't have a clue, you can't actually comment on the news because Singularity is so over your head, yet you're the loudest idiots on slashdot. OMG OPENSORS FTW!!! Idiots.

Actually working in CS research in a related field, I do have a pretty good idea of what Singularity is, how it works and how nice it is. It doesn't make it Free/Open Source by any mean and so the headline is misleading.
I know very well that Microsoft Research and Microsoft are very loosely-coupled, however the article was submitted by a Microsoft proponent (judging by his account history) which "has signed an NDA with Microsoft" and one can very well see how this benefits to Microsoft (they're working hard to make everyone think they do "Open Source" too with their SharedSource initiatives and such -- btw they do have a few projects under true F/OSS licenses afaik).

Microsoft (as well as other proprietary software companies) is (and has been) very interested in spreading FUD regarding Open Source (such as "if the source is available then it must be Open Source", obviously using a flaw opened by the Open Source Initiative which put the emphasis on the openness of the code rather than on its freedom from the start), and with such an headline on a site such as Slashdot (ie, where a lot people go but don't browse further than the main page) I'm sure to take a coffee next week with someone who will tell me about Singularity now being Open Source... Is that your definition of "news"?

Singularity is a great research project but it's not Free/Open Source by any means. So grand-parent is right (as are others), and you are just as much as a fascist than the F/OSS zealots you criticize since your critics are based on them being OSS fascist and not on the facts being right or wrong. Let's call a cat a cat. Open Source is a well-defined term (just like "Windows-compatible" and nobody would like to see the Wine project tout itself of that feat unless it's 100% true), so let's respect it.

Re:NOT open source

[Allador (537449)]

I am appalled at how many people dont get this, but I'll say it again.

The US California non-profit organization OSI does not own, copyright, or hold a trademark on the term 'open source'.

They are also not a government or dictionary in that they get to arbitrarily redefine words and mandate that they are the new definition for the entire human race.

The term 'open source' has been around alot longer than the OSI org, and had the same meaning then as it does now. It means the source is availble to read/view.

For a pretty substantial portion of our industry, the term 'open source' used in this context is accurate.

Re:NOT open source

[john-da-luthrun (876866)]

It is certainly true that "open source" is subject to some semantic unclarity (which is one reason why I personally dislike the term, preferring "free software" - albeit that has problems of its own, of course).

However, that doesn't mean that the likes of MS should be allowed to get away with their bait-and-switch tactics of attempting to gain the perceived kudos and good marketing karma of promoting "open source" (in the OSI sense) and then turning around and saying, "Oh, we only meant it was 'open source' as in 'the source is available, on restrictive terms'". Nor that, as I said in my original comment, /. should be adding to the confusion over the term.

My guess is that the original submitter didn't appreciate that "non-commercial" takes the licence outside the scope of the OSI's definition of open source - not that they meant to use "open source" in some broader sense of "source is available".

Re:Why are people excited about this?

[shutdown -p now (807394)]

With verifiable managed code (i.e. the one that doesn't use pointers and such), it is possible to statically prove that it will never access the address space of another process. Once you've done that, you don't need to isolate such processes from each other. This property is already used in .NET with something that MS has called "AppDomains", which allow you to isolate different parts of a single managed process from each other. I would imagine that it can also be useful in a kernel.