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Why is ZeroOS a closed source OS?

Roman wrote:Why is ZeroOS a closed source OS?

@Roman Because people who are inspired by my project will simply copy and paste my code.
Of course if you need help, I can give you code samples, but officially ZeroOS is closed source.
If you need anything, message me :: [email protected]

Since ZeroOS runs in real mode, it probably has no error detection. Wrong! ZeroOS has its own BSoD which I call a ZeroOS Kernel BOOOM
To test it worked correctly, I wrote an application for it: And ZeroOS caught this error, in real mode!

omarrx024 wrote:

Roman wrote:Why is ZeroOS a closed source OS?

@Roman Because people who are inspired by my project will simply copy and paste my code.
Of course if you need help, I can give you code samples, but officially ZeroOS is closed source.
If you need anything, message me :: [email protected]

Well, it's up to you, and these are my toughts and two cents on that decision:

The problem you are describing is solved by applying licenses to your code. Something you may want to consider is the GPL, as it forces anyone who makes a modification of your code to give the patch back to the project. Even if somebody would decides to copy your code, you can contact GitHub/BitBucket/whatever service and inform them about the infringement. As soon as a service has obtained that information, he's forced to take the infringing code down (assuming you live in the EU or the US).

You've got no chance of detecting any violation of the license you have applied to your project, but I think that a lot of people don't simply copy code. Keeping your code private isn't the solution, as decompilation is possible and yields usable results. Decompilation is allowed by the copyright law in Germany, so decompiling your binaries isn't a problem here (assuming your binaries aren't stripped).

no92 wrote:Well, it's up to you, and these are my toughts and two cents on that decision:

The problem you are describing is solved by applying licenses to your code. Something you may want to consider is the GPL, as it forces anyone who makes a modification of your code to give the patch back to the project. Even if somebody would decides to copy your code, you can contact GitHub/BitBucket/whatever service and inform them about the infringement. As soon as a service has obtained that information, he's forced to take the infringing code down (assuming you live in the EU or the US).

You've got no chance of detecting any violation of the license you have applied to your project, but I think that a lot of people don't simply copy code. Keeping your code private isn't the solution, as decompilation is possible and yields usable results. Decompilation is allowed by the copyright law in Germany, so decompiling your binaries isn't a problem here (assuming your binaries aren't stripped).

Yes, but I live in Egypt and I have nothing here, so i distribute it for free with code samples to anyone, but full code is closed source.

Here's the new ZeroOS boot screen! I decided showing boot messages for everything it did was too old fashioned, it was like Linux in the days of 2000 (I know because I tried my dad's Red Hat, a very old version)
So I redesigned it to progress the bar at the bottom with everything it does. The progress bar progresses for these things (in this order):
- Installs system interrupts and error handling code
- Loads configuration file from the disk
- Parses configuration file
- Loads launcher program specified in configuration file
- Boot finished and give control to launcher
By the way, the ZeroOS website is finished, check it out!
http://zeroos.eu.pn/
Screenshots will be posted in my site!

I know this is not very impressive (since I'm still very behind), but I got a few nifty features features working in my little virtual kernel. Virtual because it runs inside a runtime environment, which I wrote myself.
It's quite portable (the full compilation uses SDL/OpenGL libraries but you can minimize this by not passing a few options to the compiler (which define whether to use extra libraries or not). In that case it only uses stuff from libc. I managed to port it to x86 (32+64), ARM and PPC.
There's some bad code in there too, but hopefully I'll work on fixing them, but anyways here's the feature list:
-Dynamic Linking
-Memory Protection
-Exception handling
-Streams
-Multithreading (software-only)
-Inbuilt debugger (with disassembler)
-Native Linking (Programs can call functions from shared libraries written for the target platform)
I'm planning to write an LLVM CG for this, sure it ain't easy, but it should make it more usable than it is now. I may have to switch to ELF (currently it uses my own format) in future.

Below is a screenshot of it running my little 'virtual' kernel. As you can see in the background, I've disassembled the current instruction using the inbuilt debugger.

@Bender how did you make that font?

The culmination of 4 months of on-off work is, ultimately, 4 lines printed on the screen.



@Bender: Nice work!

requimrar wrote:The culmination of 4 months of on-off work is, ultimately, 4 lines printed on the screen.

@requimrar It's cool to have processes! My little ZeroOS kernel runs in real mode so it doesn't have those things!
Keep up the good work!

Bender: Your code isn't portable until it runs on any unknown processor on any unknown operating system providing the usual standard system API. Don't call your code portable unless this is true. Note, you are allowed to make minimum requirements to the standard API, and you should.

You don't port to PPC. You port to the C abstract machine and suddenly your code works everywhere.

My latest program for ZeroOS...
A text file viewer!
Some time tomorrow or the day after, ZeroOS is going to make its first release "0.1 alpha" and it will be available for download at http://zeroos.eu.pn/down.html !
I will release the kernel and bootloader alone, the ZeroSH shell alone and applications alone in a ZIP file. I will also include a complete disk image file that you can attach to VirtualBox, QEMU, or whatever Virtual Machine you use!
Thanks for replying to my posts of ZeroOS screenshots! You've been helping without even knowing it (the replies are encouragment for me!)
BTW, I will release ZeroOS as shared source project! If you want the source code, let me know!

EDIT: My text viewer only works with DOS/Windows text files, which have the new line as CRLF (carriage return, linefeed). UNIX text files (line feed alone) is not supported. I will support it the future though!

I tested ZeroOS to work on my laptop's hardware (Intel Core i3, 4 GB RAM, etc.)
So, I installed SYSLINUX to my USB stick and booted the ZeroOS floppy image from there using MEMDISK. (Both are available at the Syslinux website)
And everything worked, from the kernel to the shell to the bitmap image viewer! Sorry for not posting a picture of the text viewer, but my Internet is pretty slow right now *everyone's home and doing things, so it's expected*

PS: Tomorrow, I'm releasing ZeroOS on my site http://zeroos.eu.pn/down.html and it's going to become a shared source project. If you want the code, PM me or email me : [email protected]

Great work omarrx024!

MessiahAndrw wrote:Great work omarrx024!

@MessiahAndrw thanks a lot! Its not much because it runs in real mode. I'm making a release "0.1 alpha" tomorrow and it will be available on my site http://zeroos.eu.pn/down.html