In 1984 Richard Stallman launched a movement that caused a revolution in the software industry. The key idea of this movement is that the software should be free - not free as beer but free as speech. The users of the software should not be compelled to deal with the developers who may or may not support their intents with the software.
The first step of this movement was to show people that it is really possible to develop software without the traditional proprietary restrictions imposed by all the software companies on the field. There were more attempts to do so but the most successfull is the GNU operating system.
The second step is an operating system that is friendly to free software only. This decision to leave proprietary software support out of the world affects some fields of the OSHS design:
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Binary file formats
When the operating system is declared to support free software only, it is not necessary to support all the bloated executable file formats and the buggy and broken designs of libraries available today. Executable file formats specially optimized for the hardware platforms that are supported can be designed; each such executable binary file format will contain only the informations meaningfull for that very platform. Everything that is required to add support for a new binary file format is to learn the compiler about the new format (and the new architecture) and then cross-compile everything for the new platform. |
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Fine grained scalability
When you are not required to pay attention to proprietary software available for your platform, you can make the operating system and the software much more scalable. This reduces both, the computing overhead (there is less code and data to cope with) and the security threats (less code to break). |
The term Free software only friendly means that no proprietary software is allowed in OSHS. With the help of The Holy Spirit obstacles will be placed into various parts of the system, mostly obstacles in the form of a copyleft license. These obstacles will be designed so that they don't affect free software development in any way. But the proprietary software developers will in OSHS probably soon begin to feel like in a hell. However they always will have the option to make their software free; when they do it, all these nasty obstacles will disappear to them once they do so.
A digital license management system (DRLS) will be developed for those users that want to ensure no proprietary software will find its way into their OSHS installation without their knowledge and permission. This digital license management system will of course be free software, because there is no technical reason of having the source code of that system secret. See here for more details on how the DRLS will be implemented.
It may sound that this decision is not good for OSHS. That would be true in early 80's when the GNU project started. Then existed almost no free software; one would have to depend on proprietary software even when he just wanted to boot a computer. But now complete free operating systems are available and also huge amount of free software was developed for all computer uses demanded by a common user. Therefore the decision for the OSHS to be free software only friendly has diametrally different consequences for it than it would have in early 80's.
At early stages of the OSHS development when OSHS is still unknown, proprietary software may be allowed to enter the OSHS world in exchange for a money. The companies trying to enter OSHS world with their proprietary products will be required to spend huge amounts of money to maintain their exceptions allowing them to exist in OSHS. This option is currently not available yet; as work on OSHS progresses to some kind of usable state, ways will be developed how to issue these exceptions and how to make the DRMS system in OSHS to know about them so it will not issue any "false alarms" when a proprietary software is allowed to exist in OSHS.