The Tunes root project

"To make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe"

-- Carl Sagan


These WWW pages as well as the whole Tunes project are
Copyright (c) 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 François-René Bân "Faré" Rideau Ðang-Vu and the Members of the TUNES project.

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.


Contents of the Tunes Project

Introduction
A short description of What the Tunes project is, including a FAQ list with answers.

Papers
Papers and Articles about Tunes.

Subprojects
Tunes is divided recursively into Subprojects:

Project Status
The Status of current Tunes development.

Project Schedule
A Schedule for further Tunes development.

Mailing-list
Tunes has got a mailing list, of which you can read the on-line archive.

Files
Tunes currently has no more FTP site to contain a distribution of all Tunes software.
But still, we publish our software on the Internet through the WWW. Check the Files page to access our archives.

Charter
The Tunes Charter.

Project Members
A list of active Tunes project members to know more about us.

Changelog
We briefly "log" the Changes in the Tunes project.

Review
In the Review subproject, we inspect related software projects, particularly about OSes and Languages. We also compare compares Tunes to them.


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.

Its scope is the whole computing world; it aims at absolutely all kinds of users, (we make no arbitrary racial or other distinction among them), from newbies to gurus, humans or machines, all kinds of computing, from video games to professional expert systems, on all kind of platforms, from pocket calculators to mainframe computer.
Its approach is based on a permanent, serious, deep reflection about how the computing world could be, how it should be, and why it should be so (see our article Why a New OS) including both theoretical and practical considerations, which we invite you to share with us. We believe that both theory without practice and practice without theory lead to deeply flawed systems. Thus this project is neither a purely philosophical nor a purely experimental project: it's an ethical project.
Since the project is in an early development stage, we're currently looking for the guru (or would-be guru) type of collaborator. Don't be modest; if you're ready to work, you can easily become a guru. The project is currently not funded, and lives on the spare time of its collaborators.
The project will freely distribute all its code over this world, but will reserve the right to offer non-free support for it. Code will be copyrighted so that it will stay freely distributable, but the project will stay in control of commercial use, distribution, and support of any code produced. The essential portions of the OS, those needed to run most everything, will be GNU copylefted, so everyone can be confident about freely using it.

The project is divided recursively into subprojects each having its own maintainer, according to the Tunes Charter. This page is the root project of the above hierarchy.


Papers about Tunes


Tunes project status

The Tunes project is currently in early development stage. Current release is 0.0.0.34. But if you access this page through the WWW, it already has changed a bit since the release.
Look for the latest developments on the Tunes mailing-list archive.


Tunes project Schedule

Small Fixes
There are "ToDo" entries in all WWW files of things that should be done.
Source directories also include README files with ToDo entries.
Version numbering
Deadlines
They were all blown out :( New ones when things are settled as for who will work how much on which parts of Tunes.
The Flux project has announced their new, full-featured toolkit for May 1997. Should be RSN!


Contributing to Tunes

Now you can help us, and we beg you do so, be it "merely" by sending us feedback or pointers to other people's work. What did you understand/misunderstand, like/dislike, agree/disagree with? What improvements could be done, in the contents or style of this page? What gross or subtle mistakes are we doing, that you can point us to? What other subjects would you like the project to cover, even though you might not be able to actively help us cover it? Who do you know could help us? Where do you know we could find useful information?


More netsurfing


To Do in the root project


Project Coordinator: Faré
New WWW maintainer: any serious taker???