Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

I suspect novel proprietary kernels are a very difficult business niche. I'm unaware of any new commercially viable OS kernel that has come along in the past decade...maybe even longer. Linux (and to a lesser degree, BSD) seem to have a very firm lock on the market, from quite small devices on up to very large ones. Certainly, there's still room at the very bottom (devices smaller than RPi) and at the very top (what little big iron remains) that isn't owned completely by free and Open Source systems...but, it's looking like a pretty tight squeeze, to me, for a system that targets the small end of Linux' market, and does so without some dramatic differentiation (the mentioned 5MB size is entirely do-able with Linux, even modern Linux...old Linux kernel versions could fit on a floppy with room to spare for utilities).

It's not that I don't like seeing new kernels and new ideas. I'm just not seeing a path to profitability for something like this (but I thought Dropbox was a bad idea, so I may be stupid).

So, what's the market niche for this that isn't better served by an Open Source platform?

Thanks for the feedback. We're optimistic about the idea of focusing on what can be gained by starting from scratch. Specifically by creating a modern API between the core kernel and device drivers, we think we can make interesting advances in areas like system-wide power management, component level servicing/updates, and overall "debuggability". We believe these areas will become even more important as general purpose operating systems are integrated into more embedded devices.

The problem is that as long as the kernel is proprietary, people have no reason to trust it to run that kind of hardware.

There may be another exception: very specialized OSes in critical environments like planes or satellites.

These environments generally need a real time OS with a small footprint (for auditability, or even prove a part of the code).

Yeah, but you need to design an OS from scratch to supported these hard realtime and safety requirements. There are a few ones out there (VxWorks, Integrity, ...). But the linked OS seems more to focus on the general purpose OS role.

QNX is a commercially successful micro-kernel being used in automotive industries.

QNX is 30+ years old, and is effectively defunct except in a few niche markets after being acquired by Blackberry (and was losing market share to Linux for decades before that). QNX is not an example of a new and successful proprietary kernel competitor to Linux, despite being well-regarded and pretty neat technology.

And is about 35 years old... GP mentioned 'last decade'

It was. And it's heavily on the decline, since it's substituted for Linux in a lot of new projects. This underlines SwellJoes assumptions that new operating systems have it very hard.

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