Regarding the Future of ELKS

[Jody <jbruchon@nc.rr.com>]

Hello everyone.  This is Jody, the current maintainer of the ELKS 
project.  I wanted to ask for everyone's opinion on what the future of 
ELKS should be.

I can see many compelling reasons to drop ELKS entirely or shift it away 
from the 80(2)86-oriented platform, including the following:

* No one works on ELKS.  Really.  I'm no C programmer, and apparently 
all the ones that COULD work on it have moved on to "bigger better 
things" in their lives.

* 8086/80286 cores are being dropped in favor of other platforms, 
including ARM, 386EX, Coldfire, etc.  While embedded Linux covers a lot 
of that territory, there is certainly some room for discussion of 
changing ELKS to be more portable and pushing it to those platforms. 
The minimalist approach to the ELKS kernel would make it far smaller 
than Linux and it could potentially compete with the likes of other 
smaller operating systems used in embedded applications, such as VxWorks.

* ELKS has not developed to a very "usable" stage yet.  There are a 
hundred different ways the project could go, but the original stated 
goals are quickly showing that they are not it.  Lack of interest in the 
project and limited ability to reuse the code are clear signs that 
something must change.

To those of you who are still subscribed to this list: what do you think 
should be done?  I look forward to hearing your answers!

~Jody