HelenOS: 20 years of past history, 20 years of future vision

The basic foundations of the HelenOS project as we know it today have been laid in late 2004 and early 2005. This 20th anniversary is an opportunity not only for the usual status update talk about the recent developments and near future plans, but also a great opportunity to look at the bigger picture.

While the first 5 years of HelenOS were exploratory and the next 10 years were defined by dynamic expansion on all fronts by more than 80 individual contributors, the last 5 years could be fairly described as maintenance with much less activity.

HelenOS is alive and well, but there are no longer any low-hanging fruits in terms of major subsystems or frameworks missing. There is obviously still a sheer amount of individual hardware devices, file systems, standard APIs and polished features that could be supported or implemented, but that is clearly a less rewarding endeavor for potential contributors than working on the major building blocks like before.

Are there generic lessons to be learned from the story of HelenOS? Is every community-driven non-mainstream OS destined to end up in this "serene valley"? How do we plan to get out of it? The goal of this talk is to discuss these questions.