Andrew Tanenbaum: «...A microkernel is much better engineered and is more modular and easier to understand. Monolithic kernels are still too big and unreliable. My metric is the TV set. The system should run for 10 years with a total of zero failures for 99.9% of the users...»

"Interesting commentary from Linux kernel founder Linus Torvalds a few weeks ago in an interview on Simple Talk. He covers areas including microkernels vs. monolithic kernels..."

"A microkernel is a minimal computer operating system kernel which, in its purest form, provides no operating-system services at all, only the mechanisms needed to implement such services, such as low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication (IPC).

The Symbian Foundation today announced a significant milestone in its plan to move the entire Symbian platform into open source: the release of the platform microkernel (EKA2) and supporting development kit under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs) says its open source real-time virtualizing microkernel was used by Toshiba in a mobile phone widely available in Japan and Australia. Toshiba's W47T phone runs Linux on top of OK's OKL4 microkernel, and is distributed by KDDI, Japan's second-largest wireless carrier.

"Virtualizing microkernel vendor Open Kernel Labs (OK) has joined the partner ecosystems of ARM and MontaVista. The Chicago-based spin-out from Australia's national computer R&D thinktank says that mutual customers have combined its products with MontaVista Linux for nearly two years."

"Novell has filed its Rule 26 Pretrial Disclosures [PDF]. What's that? It's required by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure Rule 26 that the parties tell in advance what witnesses, depositions, and exhibits or documents they expect to use at trial."

Alan Cox talks about cooperation with hardware vendors, patent law, microkernels, and GPLv3: "I think [the MS-Novell deal] is a bad idea and that Novell are going to get stung by the GPLv3, and rightfully so. The license is designed to keep the software free, if it fails to do this then it needs fixing, so GPLv3 hopefully will fix this flaw."

It's unfortunate, but an operating system's reputation can, and usually does, have as much effect on its success as its technical merits. For example, this video shows a number of people praising KDE 4, because they think that it is the next version of Windows. Or think about the difference in perception between Windows Vista and Windows 7 versus the real differences.