Thanks yardshop for clarifying my point of view. And I agree with you stavros. There should be multiple ways of building things, some of which must be practical. Most of our day-to-day job should not be building things from scratch, even though there is a lot of fun in doing so :)

It's not criticizing anything at all, just suggesting an alternative. We're all always using products that are other people's work, why not ALSO work on something where you author and build your own system?

Seen another way, SerenityOS is almost entirely built on the work of others. Code isn't the hard part in any software project, it's usually the design and architecture that's the hard part (the source of competitive advantage).

The reason Andreas was able to build a community around SerenityOS so fast is the same reason Stallman/Linus were able to do so - everything about it is a direct clone of designs proven out by commercial OS vendors. The core is UNIX (well understood) and the GUI is Windows 2000 (well understood). The code may be fresh, but even there, it is just an ordinary C++ based OS, as conventional as can be. This means working on it is fun for the developers because there are relatively few debates over direction or design, and little risk - you know what you're getting right from the start.

But to claim that such a project is doing it all from scratch zero-rates the design aspect, which seems wrong.

Whilst that's a valid point of view, it needs to be balanced against good old "don't reinvent the wheel."

I'm not quite sure how I would marry those two concepts.

Ah, I thought you were talking about projects that make something novel vs projects that glue together APIs to create something new. I see what you mean now, sorry.

I'm not who you initially replied to, but I just felt he wasn't being critical of something else, just promoting an idea that is also of good value. I think there's value in creating new things by combining existing ones as well.