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Looking for partners

Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 7:28 am
by bsunisol
hi at all,
i'm working on a little operating system project ... ( what else #-o :) ).
but you all know thats extremly hard work and a lot of code and other things to do...

i'm currently working on the 2nd stage loader. the fat12 bootstrap ist allready working.
this project is just for fun. just to learn a bit more about pcs and know them better.
the project is done in 16/32bit asm and c++.
last but not loeast, i am from germany.

please write if you want to know more or if you are interrested.

thanks and regards

Re: Looking for partners

Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 10:57 am
by piranha
Do you have a design plan? Why should we join your project instead of our own?

-JL

Re: Looking for partners

Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 12:12 pm
by Troy Martin
Design is important. Are you going to build off of a simple idea and expand as time goes by? Or do you have a set plan? Will this project need more than one person? Can you tackle most of the kernel by yourself?

Beginner Mistakes and Getting Started are good articles to read on the wiki.

Cheers,
Troy

Re: Looking for partners

Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 3:57 pm
by bsunisol
if you are allready involved in a project why should you get part of mine??

yes i have a plan, and i asked not for tutrial- or beginnersupport.

i guess its much more easier to do such a project with a staff then by one man.
lets say two or three programmers have more ideas then one man alone.

Re: Looking for partners

Posted: Mon Jun 22, 2009 4:16 am
by Brendan
Hi,
bsunisol wrote:if you are allready involved in a project why should you get part of mine??
Virtually everyone on these forums is either already writing an OS (usually their own), or they've given up on OS development (e.g. wife, kids, loans, job, and no free time to do much of anything). That doesn't leave many (any) potential helpers for your OS; unless your OS is so impressive that people are willing to dump everything they've spent ages working on in favour of your ideas. The same concept applies to almost all decent programmers - they're all working on something, and they'd all need a very good reason to volunteer to help your project.

To put this another way:
Beginner Mistakes (from the wiki) wrote:Community Projects

Don't overestimate your chances of getting people interested in your project. Even the more successful projects usually consist of one, perhaps two people actually working on the code. And that is not due to a lack of need.

Brooks' Law states that the more people on a project, the longer it takes. The only way around this is to split the project into parts that you get people working on and only on that part. Good luck.
bsunisol wrote:yes i have a plan, and i asked not for tutrial- or beginnersupport.
Great - you've got a plan. Is this plan so impressive that people will dump their current project and volunteer the next 10 years or so of their lives to work on your plan (without actually seeing your plan first)?
bsunisol wrote:i guess its much more easier to do such a project with a staff then by one man.
lets say two or three programmers have more ideas then one man alone.
Unfortunately that is also a big problem. With 2 or 3 programmers it's very likely that each programmer will have their own idea of just how things should be implemented, so instead of getting work done you end up wasting a huge amount of time trying to get everyone to agree.

Another problem to watch out for is the "master's apprentice" problem, where someone volunteers to help you because they want to learn. You spend half your time teaching, until the apprentice has learnt as much as they can from you and decides to ditch your project and start their own project. In this case you lose a lot of time and gain very little, and would probably get more work done faster by working alone.

IMHO the best way is for you to write the majority of the kernel, etc yourself, so that any volunteers have something to work with and you avoid the problems above. If the project ever becomes impressive enough then people will want to help (but it's extremely unlikely that your first attempt at an OS will be impressive - plan on doing several rewrites before you're happy with it)


Cheers,

Brendan