There's still hope for Unix, if DragonFly BSD is any measure. A shame no one feels the need to follow its lead.
And yes, that PHK op ed is well known. It's been posted here before, though if I have to be honest PHK messes up his nomenclature, even if his points are mostly correct.
No Oberon, but maybe we can at least get some good capabilities like EROS if the work on Capsicum goes through.
Just looked up DragonFly BSD. Prior I just heard it was doing concurrency or something differently. Looking at the details... damn, I'm impressed. It's still a UNIX architecture with the good and bad that comes from that. Yet, they're applying rather than ignoring many good engineering choices for dealing with various UNIX problems such as concurrency, integration, OS-level faults, & kernel debugging. The HAMMER filesystem is also a nice development given it's not GPL or Oracle-related (right?). A BSD alternative to ZFS is by itself worth a whole project.
So yeah, there's still hope for UNIX. Looks like that hope goes two ways:
1. UNIX variants like DragonFly that intentionally break things or get rid of crud to better themselves over time.
2. People on such projects who stumble onto superior architectures while looking for improvements and start building a better non-UNIX.
I'll have to update myself on DragonFly in near future. Good that you know about EROS and Capsicum: ahead of most ;). Check out CheriBSD on CHERI processor if you like that. Far as software, JX Operating System and GenodeOS are two clean-slate one's with architectures you might find interesting. Interesting in terms of foundations to build better stuff on.
Oh yeah, there was a talk about CheriBSD at this year's BSDcan. Gotta look more into it. GenodeOS looks fascinating from first glance. I'm aware of the various JVM-based OSes, but I have no personal interest in them. Thanks anyway.
And yes, that PHK op ed is well known. It's been posted here before, though if I have to be honest PHK messes up his nomenclature, even if his points are mostly correct.
No Oberon, but maybe we can at least get some good capabilities like EROS if the work on Capsicum goes through.