Led by a 16-year-old Canadian college student, a small group of computer-savvy Internet users from countries around the world has been quietly working on a project that is either visionary or foolhardy -- building an operating system that could one day challenge Microsoft’s Windows.
But the child prodigy and his band of coders are also learning the difficulties of keeping an international team of volunteers together: An argument that broke out last month could doom the ambitious effort.
The goal of the project is to build a kind of dream operating system. Called “Freedows,” it would do everything Microsoft’s Windows does, plus allow users to plug in “modules” that could replicate other popular operating systems, such as those for Apple’s Macintosh and for older computers like the Commodore 64.
And, as its name suggests, Freedows would be available free.
Some computer programmers say that Freedows is too good to be true, and that the project will never deliver on its promises. But there are notable precedents for such an effort’s succeeding. And more than 2,000 volunteers -- several of them college students -- take this one seriously enough that they’ve signed up for it over the past two years.
Active members of the project tackle small pieces of the overall system in their spare time, communicating with one another using e-mail and chat rooms. Although the volunteers haven’t gotten beyond basic specifications for the system so far, they say they hope to have a working version as early as 1999.
The leader and founder of the Freedows project is Reece K. Sellin, a third-year undergraduate at the University College of the Cariboo, in Kamloops, British Columbia. He says he started the project two years ago to develop a free alternative to the popular Windows operating system. He was 14 at the time.
“The general spirit is, we want to develop something that is better than what is available, and that is free,” he says. But he adds that the group has a policy against Microsoft-bashing when discussing Freedows. “That’s not what the development is based on,” says Mr. Sellin.
He modeled the project’s organizational structure on those of other cooperative efforts to design operating systems, some of which have been successful. Perhaps the best known of those efforts is the one that created Linux, a free version of the Unix operating system. The team that created Linux was started by a 21-year-old college student in Finland, and now -- after seven years of development -- the system is used by seven million to eight million people.
At the core of the Freedows operating system is an idea from a Stanford University research paper that a Freedows volunteer found on the World-Wide Web. The technique described in the paper is called a “Cache Kernel Interface,” and it allows several operating-system modules to run simultaneously on the same computer.
No one at Stanford is directly involved with Freedows, but one of the authors of the cache-kernel paper, Kenneth J. Duda, has answered technical questions from Freedows members. “I was delighted that they were able to get use out of some of our ideas,” says Mr. Duda, who is a doctoral student in computer science at Stanford.
The project moves along in fits and starts, as the volunteers’ schedules allow. Occasional updates about its progress are posted to the project’s World-Wide Web sites, which volunteers have translated into several languages. Most of the volunteers have never seen their compatriots, or heard their voices. In their on-line discussions, there have always been occasional disagreements, say some members.
But in late August, a more serious rift occurred. It started when someone on “Slashdot,” a discussion list for computer programmers, accused Freedows of being an elaborate hoax.
Mr. Sellin, the project’s leader, was not amused. He dashed off a scathing response in the list’s public-discussion area.
“The Freedows team is not playing games, however, how would you know this, not being on the team, and in most cases having only a limited understanding of software engineering, design and management principles?” he wrote in the message. “I ask you this: where were you, and what were your accomplishments at age 16, and what world-wide projects have you founded and are currently coordinating?”
Several Freedows members who saw Mr. Sellin’s response say they considered it arrogant and insulting. Some members confronted Mr. Sellin in a discussion on the project’s private electronic-mailing list, members say.
It’s difficult for outsiders to piece together exactly where the discussion went from there, but no one describes its route as a pretty one. Mr. Sellin says some members insulted him based on his age, and even taunted one another with ethnic slurs. Some volunteers were “fired” by Mr. Sellin. Others quit in protest. Someone hacked into one of the project’s Web pages and posted the message “Freedows sucks!”
“Within 72 hours, almost the entire team of active developers for Freedows had left,” says Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr., then the “ambassador” for the Freedows project, and one of those who walked.
Mr. Sellin plays down the damage done by the incident. “We are continuing the development of the project, and restructuring the kernel lead team,” he says. “This is just something that is going to be in the past.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Sickmon and several other Freedows defectors have started their own operating-system project. They call it Alliance, after the rebel alliance in the Star Wars movies. Members of both groups say they’re not competing with one another, and both will have access to all of the work that was done under Freedows.
The rift that has split the Freedows project demonstrates the difficulties in trying to build a working product with volunteers, especially if they are spread across the world. “That very much does show the downside of that process,” says Mr. Sickmon. “At any given time, that could happen.”
Still, other operating-system projects continue to show that the process can work. A project called WINE, which is building a free version of Windows that will run on top of Linux, has produced a working test-release of its operating system. The project is much less ambitious than Freedows, however.
“Politics is common and natural in established free software projects,” says Doug Ridgway, a member of the WINE project. “Perhaps the splinter group will produce something,” he says of the Freedows rift. “Time will tell.”
