"With just a high school education..."

What a ridiculous thing to say. Did Jordan Hubbard's education stop after highschool? Was he locked down to whatever knowledge he had gleaned up until that point, never to accomplish any greater intellectual achievements? Did he just sit back and decide to learn nothing? When I was in college most CS programs were far behind industry practices. You might learn plenty of important things in college at that time, but nothing about software engineering that a determined enthusiast could not learn simply by reading Dr. Dobbs.

It's particularly disheartening to read this on a site like Slashdot, where people should know that technology moves so fast that they only way to succeed in the field is to have a large enough intellectual talent to teach oneself. The people that can do this should be respected for their objective accomplishments and not, as the poster implies, be patronized for overcoming a disability. There is more than one road to knowledge.

I'm not in any way diminishing the accomplishments of college graduates, but the way that sentence was written struck me as a bit off.

I sometimes think that a lot of the best examples of how to solve these problems are in our own past, the 60's and 70's being something of a golden age for OS research, and we just need to go back and study some of those examples and figure out how to bring them up to date and complete that "last 10%" they never managed (because it would have taken 90% of the time, as the adage goes).

I'm glad he stuck it out and pushed through on that last 10% for us to enjoy. You don't see as much of that going on but it is nice to see that some people still push through the glamour to finish a project. He could have just said forget it and quit when things went bad with 386BSD.

Just look at Freshmeat/Sourceforge/parts unknown for all the projects that start but lose steam and stop. My hats off to all of you code monkeys out there keeping on and producing. I'll see if I can do anything to help because I know I couldn't complete my own project.

That's pretty much a non sequitur; capability-based schemes can be a component (and a particularly byzantine one, in my opinion) of a security system. But they aren't necessary for security. They are just a way of implementing specific security policies -- and you can make the latter mountain as high as you want. That doesn't have anything to do with FreeBSD's goals, however, just as extreme "portability" is not a FreeBSD goal. What the EROS folks do is their own business.

As a footnote, I think the idea of trying to preserve the Unix API in the face of such a radically un-Unix-like security sceheme is a bit silly.

-Ed