[sgt101]

I shared a co-working space with a guy who had written a distributed OS for rendering; it was quite neat - but about 1000 man years from being usable.

I felt sad for him - he'd poured his heart into it for more than 10 years (he said) and had no idea of how to turn it into anything other than a hobby project. He hadn't open sourced it, his aspiration was that "Facebook will buy it". I haven't seen him since the pandemic kicked in.

[rualca]

> I felt sad for him - he'd poured his heart into it for more than 10 years (he said) and had no idea of how to turn it into anything other than a hobby project.

There is nothing wrong with that. It's fun to do things just for fun.

> He hadn't open sourced it, his aspiration was that "Facebook will buy it".

It's hard to believe that's anyone's real motivation for such a project.

[johnwheeler]

Often when you do things just for fun, you’re driven by the possibilities of what could be. That’s part of the fun. This is especially true of software, and there’s nothing wrong with it.

What there is something wrong with is criticizing others’ motivations because they seem outlandish to you. It’s fine and even healthy to be so ambitious. Not all of us want to sit around playing with legos assuming that’s the best a reasonable life has to offer.

[sgt101]

Yea - agree about fun to do things for fun - but my impression was that he had given up a great deal to work on the system and unfortunately genuinely believed that somehow he would be able to monetize his efforts and that his hard work and insight would "pay off".

I hope it does, I don't think it will.

[amelius]

Did you ask him why this needed a new OS, as opposed to e.g. some daemons running on top of an existing OS?

[sgt101]

Yes, and the answer was "to securely control the resources" which I think makes some sense; but he is very short on details about his approach. I asked him for a white paper - no white paper.