Open letter to L4 developers

Frankly, I am wondering why all of you are working so hard to create virtualization for Linux, when this has been done in so many ways ranging from IBM mainframes to PC emulation, and especially on L4.

Linux suffers from being a monolithic kernel, making it very difficult to support by hardware and peripheral manufacturers, which has kept it from being a mainstream OS allowing it to be a true alternative to Microsoft, and also Apple, of the benefit of the vast majority of humanity.

This fault goes back nearly two decades to the debate Linus had with Andrew Tannenbaum. Time has shown Linus to have been very, very wrong, as every other popular OS is a microkernel OS.

The social implication is that society can determine democratically what kind of intelligent devices it wants in its future. So far, all these decisions have been made by corporate executives, including decisions for Linux: IBM. When we saw the Linux culture drop support for legacy hardware, which especially hurts the third world, we knew that there was a problem in the initial social model, perhaps better defined as a scheme with hindsight. Further inquiry shows fault in Linus' initial thinking, and that the popular support he received leading to the success of the Linux kernel was at best a successful social phenomena, as it failed as a beneficial and purely democratic implementation of technology in our present phase of the Information Society.

What we need in the world with respect to communication is free communication, which implies IP communication, the only free packet transport that is available. All politicians have worked to make IP communication proprietary, claiming that they seek to "stimulate" economies, but in fact have simply been handing over valuable resources to the most selfish people. Al Gore, the supposedly-liberal politician from the United States is the most guilty of this. When he said "I invented the Internet" what he really meant was "I took the Internet away from the people, and gave it to the most greedy, the corporate executives and board members."

These ideas can easily be extended into an extremely well-supported argument showing nearly sociopathic control over technology, and most of the Information Society back to the beginnings of civilization (Mumford: Technics and Civilization), by the operators of our society who are guilty of such much more, such as endless environmental and social exploitation, not to mention a perennial tendency to genocide. (We had hoped that Obama would be an exception, but, again, with hindsight, that was unrealistically hopeful.)

All in all, it is time to dump the corporate-centric paradigm, which if you understand that the capital model that we have inherited nearly intact from Rome (Durant, Mumford, others) comes with a semi-democratic political system actually called Fascism. Sixty years ago we had to defeat Fascism in an exceedingly violent world war, but back then we failed to recognize that our own semi-democracy is built upon the same Roman political, financial, and hence information model. I am not proposing a world war (I never would, I am a pacifist) but something has to be done; there is an extreme need for radical change in the technical aspects of the Information Society (I am a realist.)

I strongly support your efforts to create the "hooks" necessary to start building computation and communication libraries and modules, which can then be absorbed into an independent and unified data manipulation paradigm, available to all devices small and large, to replace the "server centric" model that has only served to increase corporate control. Or as in the case of Linux, some other yet-undefined (and apparently unsuccessful) "open systems control" scheme.