Shap posted a few opinions about seL4 and our commercialisation agenda. They contain some significant misunderstandings/confusions, which I'll try to clarify.
On Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:22:52 -0400, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote: shap> [...] shap> Unfortunately, I suspect that the C implementation will never be shap> released in open form. This is a claim that is based on assertions (below) that are incorrect. shap> The seL4 team has formed a company, Indeed, we set up Open Kernel Labs (OK) for commercialising our microkernel technology (see http://ok-labs.com). As everyone can easily confirm from the OK web site (http://portal.ok-labs.com/), the complete kernel (called OKL4) and other stuff is downloadable and is under an OSI-approved open-source license. It is true that the OKL4 download presently supports fewer architectures and platforms than the NICTA::Pistachio-embedded downloads it is derived from. The reasons is that OK only provides code that is heavily QA-ed, which consumes significant resources, so some things aren't presently released because they haven't been through the QA process yet. There is also some discussion as to the most appropriate open-source license to use, which is holding up some things. There are no plans to move away from open-source licenses. shap> and most of the work is being done by that company. That's actually *not* true. seL4 and the verification project L4.verified are all done by NICTA (but, of course, there is excellent communication between the NICTA and OK researchers and engineers). Outcomes will be transferred to OK. shap> They have 30 people employed shap> already. For those of you who don't have any experience with corporate shap> finances, 30 people cost between $6M US and $7.5M US per year. Perhaps shap> 15% less in Australia, but that isn't important to the point I am shap> making. The company has been operating for at least two years. If you shap> are externally funded (as they are) the expected return on investment is shap> generally around 35% per year, compounded annually. In effect, they have shap> taken out two loans of ~$7.5M each (one for each year). To pay that loan shap> off, the company would require a valuation *today* of $23.78M. If they shap> have to wait another year to be saleable, they will need $42.22M. shap> You can see that the slope is very very steep. Even if they *want* to shap> release everything, the investors probably will not allow them to do so. shap> This, by the way, is why The EROS Group chose *not* to fund our shap> development using investor dollars. I'm impressed about your knowledge of OK's finances, Jon. Particularly the external investment/loan is news to me. Given that I am one of the main shareholders, and a member of the BoD, I somehow doubt that the company could have had an investment round without me hearing about it ;-) I'm not going to discuss OK's finances, which are obviously confidential. But it has been publicly stated before that OK is funded from revenue. As to the future status of seL4: We have every intention of providing an open-source implementation of seL4, when it's ready. Whether we'll release a prototype or wait until we have a production version is a management/business decision that will be taken some time in the future. A release of the Haskell prototype is overdue. Unfortunately, releasing stuff from NICTA isn't quite as easy as from a university. There are lawyers involved :-( Gernot _______________________________________________ L4-hurd mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/l4-hurd
