OSHS is a source code based operating system and as such, it is friendly for free software only. This means that everyone trying to contribute to OSHS with an application is expected to supply the source code of the application. Proprietary software (1), though tolerated under certain conditions, is unwelcomed in OSHS.
This policy has some drawbacks: it may discourage some users from using OSHS. However it also has many advantages. One of them is that OSHS is not required to support many formats of binaries that are bloated and full of legacy information fields, demanding the file to carry information that OSHS has no need and no use for (if you're a programmer who's become fed up with software bloat, then may you find here the perfect antidote). Moreover versions of OSHS for different harware platforms can have different native binary file formats that best suit their respective platforms. The interoperability is not suffered by this fact because all the supported OSHS software is free software and can be easily recompiled for the hardware of user's choice.
OSHS comes with its own format for binaries. The format was designed to consume as little disk space as possible. Nevertheless the format is designed so flexibly that support for other, non-OSHS-native binary file formats may be added into OSHS without much pain. The only requirement for the binary file format is that it must have some kind of "magic value" as the very first field of the header.
| - | Binary file header |