You raise an interesting point. However, we believe that the difficulty of securing systems makes the world less private and less free, especially as we outsource everything to third parties. A strong software base would allow us to reclaim the high ground, and empower the individual.
The future will tell about Ethos' success. But I think the earlier adopters will be the tech savvy community that wants security & privacy and buys into Ethos' programming model.
This is the reason why we believe the Tao--the way--is essential to an OS. It is the programming paradigms and use, combined with OS semantics, which is the genius of UNIX.
Of course, we've been told that a clean-slate design is doomed to failure. But we believe that all traditional OSs have failed and are unfixable. If this is the case, there really is no alternative to clean slate.
Definitely, we are starting to open it up, encourage open source developers to get involve, and to encourage wide-spread use. If you are interested in getting involved, I'd like to hear from you.
When we do release, we want the software to represent both the Tao of Ethos and to be accessible for experimentation. We are working assiduously towards that goal.
Borando is correct. MinimaLT (our TLS replacement) will use some sort of PKI, and eventually SayI. SayI is completely distributed, and enables the relying party (the entity doing the authentication) to choose which parts of the PKI to trust. And it will scale to the Internet; efficiency has been a problem with choose-who-you-trust PKIs.
We are working to release a Research Prototype for MinimaLT, which can be used for open source prototyping while simultaneously hardening our implementation.
There are a number of projects, open source and academic which are looking at MinimaLT. Some are implementing or providing interfaces for other languages (e.g., JavaScript/Erlang). Others are analyzing the security.
Most of all, we are focused on a small, tight codebase. Everything needed for security but not one iota of extra code. This is one of the ways we are engineering MinimaLT to avoid the problems that plague TLS.
Writing up the design principals of Ethos is one of my goals this summer. The short description is:
(1) Strong security services (authentication, authorization, encryption, isolation)
(2) Higher level, less error prone semantics for all OS interaction.
(3) Security guarantees derived from system layering
(4) Highly composable semantics
Note that only (1) deals with security-specific code. The rest deals with overall code quality.
