[ILUG] It's illegal, according to the barrister in PC World

[Smelly Pooh]

In reply to Rick Moen's flatulent wordings, 
> Quoting Smelly Pooh (plop at redbrick.dcu.ie):
> 
> > I wouldn't consider something a failed fad just because it hasn't hit the
> > mainstream, nor would I consider something a good design because it has.
> > For example VB is quite big, but its design is terrible, same with PERL.
> > Really ingenius designs such as ML or Haskell are still stuck in
> > academics.
> 
> The difference is that microkernels have been a spectacular failure in
> large, well-funded, mainstream projects.  

This isn't a a feature of microkernels.  Large, well-funded, mainstream
monolithic kernel projects such as MULTICS have been known to fail also.

> About the same time, FSF was, of course, making the same error -- but 
> with much less manpower and funding.  And none of the other microkernel
> efforts ever got very far, either, except maybe QNX and (briefly) BeOS.
>
> But the proof's in the pudding:  The great, breakthrough
> microkernel-based OS may be Just Around the Corner<tm>.

BeOS was well designed and I liked it, I haven't used QNX but I'm told
it's very efficient and flexible, and Mac OS X (more specifically the
underlying Darwin OS) is based on a Mach microkernel.  What exactly do
microkernel architectures have to do before they're not failures?