Show HN: Minoca OS – A new lightweight kernel, completely from scratch
I suspect novel proprietary kernels are a very difficult business niche. I'm unaware of any new commercially viable OS kernel that has come along in the past decade...maybe even longer. Linux (and to a lesser degree, BSD) seem to have a very firm lock on the market, from quite small devices on up to very large ones. Certainly, there's still room at the very bottom (devices smaller than RPi) and at the very top (what little big iron remains) that isn't owned completely by free and Open Source systems...but, it's looking like a pretty tight squeeze, to me, for a system that targets the small end of Linux' market, and does so without some dramatic differentiation (the mentioned 5MB size is entirely do-able with Linux, even modern Linux...old Linux kernel versions could fit on a floppy with room to spare for utilities).<p>It's not that I don't like seeing new kernels and new ideas. I'm just not seeing a path to profitability for something like this (but I thought Dropbox was a bad idea, so I may be stupid).<p>So, what's the market niche for this that isn't better served by an Open Source platform?