Project Proposal
10/7/00
V. 2

Part I:

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.

Part II:
Alright, Charlie wanted me to think really hard and be specific about exactly what open source programs I use, because he didn't believe it was just Linux and the GNU compiler. Strictly speaking, he's right, those are just the two I use regularly. The other ones include: vnc (a nice little X-windows program for Windows which is written in Java and which was made by AT&T in England; I really like this program), a Common Lisp interpreter for Windows (I really like this one, too), the KDE Desktop (has a really cool Dragonball Z theme, but, like all Linux GUIs, this could use a lot of work), and GNU Chess (I'd really like to be able to set this game to play at my level, so that I could actually improve, instead of just getting killed by the computer every time, which is what happens now). I know what you are thinking: what about the text editor? I use pico, which I don't believe is open source, so that's out, too. Those are, in fact, all of the open source programs I use.

The truth is, I'd rather work with intelligent agents or something along those lines, because I find that to be an extremely interesting area of computer science, but unfortunately, the only open projects I could find involving that were ones such as: "ChatBot for IRC!". This seems to be a waste of potential to me; I don't know why I'd want to log into IRC just to talk to a computer program.

The project I mentioned earlier is at least 2 years old (that's when the mailing list archive begins), has about a dozen developers, and at least several hundred users. The primary mailing list for this project is lvs-users@linuxvirtualserver.org.

I haven't found any other virtual server projects yet, but I will continue to look.