Not really sure what you're saying but Syllable is both a custom Linux distro, which is their server edition, and an operating system which was built from AtheOS which has it's own kernel, which is what is their desktop edition. The server edition is basically just there so that you can have a server with all the capabilities of Linux but a UI similar to the desktop OS's. It's been a while since I've used Syllable so things may have changed a bit though.

I think it's important to develop alternatives to Linux and BSD even if they don't have the app support (though some things can just be recompiled).

And I mean, if the developers enjoy working on it then that's up to them any way.

In case anybody doesn't know, the new standard for C that is currently being planned includes multithreading support in the form of a threads.h header.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C1x

I believe the newest GCC includes some support for some of the features of that standard already (which of the features I can't remember).

I agree absolutely. Reminds me of a story on the news a little while ago about how on average women weren't getting paid as much as men. I supposed we were all supposed to be outraged and stop listening by then, because when they went into the actual story it was simply that a large number of women were choosing lower paying jobs. Now, if there was a man and woman both doing the exact same work and the man was being paid more, then yes I would be disgusted, but we can't tell people that they HAVE to do certain jobs simply because it pays more money. It's not like the universities are rejecting female applicants to courses with high paying careers (in fact, I am now at university and most of my friends that are doing the higher paying courses are female). If women don't want to work in IT, then they don't have to work in IT. If women would rather get into a career that they enjoyed, but didn't necessarily pay as much, then that's their choice. And the same thing applies to men.