Project Proposal
10/7/00
V. 1

Well, unfortunately, I didn't have any idea about what problem space I wanted to work in when I began my search for an open source project to work on. The only piece of open source software I use consistently, aside from linux of course, is the GNU compiler, and I didn't have any problems with it. So, I began searching for any sort of project that would be interesting. At first I looked around on sourceforge, which had a lot of interesting projects, but almost all of them were in the planning stage. I couldn't tell whether anything would ever really get done with these projects, and it seemed as though getting in on a project at the planning stage would be equivalent in difficulty to starting my own project. So, I decided not to go with any of these projects.

My next idea was to search around the internet using Hotbot. My only real criteria was that it had to be an open source project, as I didn't know what sort of project I wanted to do. Finally, I found a fairly interesting one. It is a virtual Linux server. Basically, what it does is takes a cluster of Linux servers, and then makes them appear to be one server to the user. I thought that was a really cool idea.

My interest in this project is purely academic in nature. It doesn't really solve any problems I have, I just think that it's a really cool idea and that it will be sufficiently challenging to keep me interested. The project also seems to be fairly far in development, which is nice, because it means that it will probably actually amount to something. I think that working on this project will be a lot of fun.