OOSMOS – The Object-Oriented State Machine Operating System | Hacker News Reader

OOSMOS – The Object-Oriented State Machine Operating System

oosmos.com

43 pointszzglenm8 comments

We used state machine-based software in high assurance systems for easier analysis and synthesis. They've also been used in hardware design and synthesis. I believe LISP OS's with functional programming is similar.

All in all, many interesting and robust systems have leveraged state machine model in design. So it's really neat to see an OS that tries to build on this pattern from core up. I look forward to digging into it. Plus, might help with an idea ive been toying with about implementing an OS kernel in hardware: state machine synthesis is already good and these are state machines.

Why is all of the code written as strings of 'l's and '1's that macro-expand to things like 'if' and 'break'?

According to http://oosmos.com/feedback:

> The core IP of OOSMOS, oosmos.h and oosmos.c, are currently shipped as obfuscated compilable source files. We'd love to speak with open source investors to figure out a business model that allows these files to be open source in order to accelerate the adoption of this novel technology.

I don't think obfuscating code really protects it, but that seems to be the reason.

Interesting. Since you could just run the C preprocessor on it (with, e.g. gcc -E) to expand all the macros, that seems like an unusually poor method of obfuscation.

In fact, if this falls under trade secret, then whoever figures it out is free to own it. Not even sure copyright would protect the original if all they are publishing is obfuscated code. If they wanted to get serious about IP, software patents are probably the only option. Otherwise they shouldn't be releasing the code in any form IMHO.

Not only that but it's actually harder to claim violation of IP/Copyright since once the code is de-obfuscated/reverse engineered it will not resemble the shipped product and any resemblance to the original factory code can be claimed as purely coincidental since by obfuscating the code they denied anyone access to the original.

Sounds like another take on QP: http://www.state-machine.com/

Already used in medical devices, automotive, robotic, and defense applications.

And ya have to fill out a form to see the code. Nope. Check out QP for something much more industrial-grade.

Is this trying to resemble VHDL processes?

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