Re: Common carriers Re: A letter to Joe

Jeff Bone (jbone@activerse.com)
Mon, 18 May 1998 12:25:16 -0500

Let me propose a radical redefinition of "operating system" --- how
about if we consider an OS to be nothing more than the "kernel" which
provides scheduling, memory management, execution services, virtual
memory, naming services, and perhaps networking and a filesystem? Add
in the essential libraries which implement APIs to those services and
*maybe* (being generous here) some set of minimum-functionality,
essential utilities and a windowing system.

Now, I realize that this definition of operating system is appallingly
retro, but it seems to me that it works. If we adopt this definition,
and Microsoft shipped this set of capabilities without any of the other
gunk and without tying practices -wrt- other (application) products,
then it would seem to me that most of the Microsoft legal issues go
away.

jb