But the "disclaims copyright" language probably has some legal value, in many jurisdictions. It might be interpreted as a public-domain dedication, where those have meaning. Or, as a promise which was relied upon, preventing a later copyright-enforcement claim by estoppel doctrines.
A lawyer could say, and of course the advantage of existing licenses/dedications is that they've already been legally reviewed for clarity across many jurisdictions. But this sort of overt declaration may still protect many re-users if push ever came to legal shove. And it might even be useful to establish such a precedent – that sharing is safe with only such a small, clear, plain, blanket statement.
I agree that the licensing terms need clarification.
see: https://web.archive.org/web/20120510151444/http://methodlogi...
Lots of questions: does it actually have any performance benefits? A network stack? How do the mechanics of getting/editing files work?
* no networking at all
* performance - doing what?
* file primitives are implemented purely in Lua, and what is currently there resembles a pre-initialized ramfs. Closing a file is a NOP, the concept of numerical file descriptors is not fully implemented yet. So - no block devices yet.
* aside from file primitives, you have lua coroutines as the core of the scheduling, inb()/outb() (bytewise port I/O), and putpixel/clearscreen in the API implemented in C, as well as basic keyboard handling (using inb/outb wrappers) and graphics primitives (using putpixel/clearscreen) implemented in Lua.
I suggest to take a quick peek at luakernel.c and luakernel.lua in the codebase.
Play with it if you want to experiment with Lua and/or experiment with a simple OS built around a higher level language. Don't play with it if you want something to build your next app on.
I'm curious what's the easiest way to test this?
[1] https://github.com/ers35/luakernel/blob/master/bin/luakernel...
I suggest starting with bochs since this project has a bochsrc.txt in the git root that will be automatically picked up if you just run "bochs" in that directory.
This is still in the early stages of development, and much is not yet implemented. One way to trigger a crash is to call an unimplemented system call.
