The Tunes root project
"To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe"
-- Carl Sagan
First off, you should read these Warnings if you haven't yet.
For a less verbose version of this page, click here.
Now if you already know the Tunes project, you might want to see directly What's New on the WWW pages.
For a quicker browsing of these pages (around 1MB of uncompressed material for a 430KB compressed archive), you could download a copy of the WWW archive for the project, and browse a local harddisk, so you don't have to cope with the high latency and slow throughput of the internet between the Tunes site and your machine. Of course, your local copy won't be automatically updated, unless you write/install specific software.
What is Tunes ?
Actually, this is the one
Frequently Asked Question
(a.k.a. FAQ) about Tunes.
Current Computing Systems
are a source of both
great enthousiasm before their technical achievements,
and great disappointment before the barriers
that keep their potential underexploited.
There is a growing gap between the evergrowing hardware potential,
and the slowly (though surely) enhancing software realizations.
Tunes is a cybernetical project,
to rethink
how Computing Systems should be
to fill this gap,
which includes social as well as technical considerations.
The main idea in our analysis of the failure of current Operating Systems
is that the goal of an Operating System should to promote
fair exchange of mutually trustable information between independent entities,
whereas current systems will provide
but untrustable raw data under centralized control.
As a result, Tunes is politically committed
to promote libertarian ideas in Computing Systems,
and technically committed to build a proof-of-concept system
around semantically clean reflectivity.
The current Computing World is based on
centralized development,
racket on a misdefined "intellectual property",
information hiding, lack of expressiveness,
unsecure low-level communications,
and general noise.
Tunes will promote free decentralized development,
a fair market of well-defined services,
freely published software,
arbitrarily expressive information,
secure communications,
and meaningfulness.
A running Tunes system will have lots of features that are just unimaginable on current systems (see below), and even though many of them might have been seperately implemented as isolated pieces of software on various different systems; only semantics-based reflectivity truely allows these features, and whatever other features the users will develop, to be dynamically combined in a decentralized way, freeing the world from existing rackets.
To sum up the main features in technical terms, Tunes is a project to replace existing Operating Systems, Languages, and User Interfaces by a completely rethought Computing System, based on a fully reflective architecture with standard support for unification of system abstractions, security based on formal proofs from explicit negociated axioms, higher-order functions, self-extensible syntax, fine-grained composition, distributed networking, persistent storage, fault-tolerant computation, version-aware identification, decentralized (no-kernel) communication, dynamic code regeneration, high-level models of encapsulation, hardware-independent exchange of code, migratable actors, yet (eventually) a highly-performant set of dynamic compilation tools (phew).
These are NOT buzzwords. These are technical terms, and you should find precise definitions in the Glossary (if you miss a definition, please tell, so we should add it).
We want to implement such a system because we know all these are required for the computing industry to compete fairly, which is not currently possible. Even if Tunes itself does not become a world-wide OS, we hope the Tunes experience can speed up the appearance of such an OS that would fulfill our requirements.
Old blurb:
Tunes is a recursive acronym for:
"Tunes is a Useful, Not Expedient, System".
It is a project to provide both design and implementation of a
computing system,
based upon a paradigm of
computing freedom.
Such a system encompasses all computing software,
from the lowest-level hardware layers of an
operating system,
up to the highest-level layers of computer logic,
and including friendly
user interfaces,
computer languages,
distributed computing management.
Project Coordinator: Faré New WWW maintainer: any serious taker???