I listened to this 2021 talk from Timothy Roscoe and I believe it was interesting. In many ways it reminds me of Rob Pike's 2000 talk "Systems Software Researc

I listened to this 2021 talk from Timothy Roscoe and I believe it was interesting. In many ways it reminds me of Rob Pike's 2000 talk "Systems Software Research is Irrelevant," which also deplored the lack of OS research at the time. (For those of you who don't know, Rob Pike helped create the Plan 9 operating system at Bell Labs. He then moved on to Google and helped create the Go programming language.) However, I wonder if the reason behind fewer OS papers describing radical departures from Unix/Linux, whether it's back in 2000 when Rob Pike spoke on this topic or in 2021, is because the incentive structures that govern researchers' careers discourage this type of work? Writing an operating system requires a lot of effort. One could shrug this off, saying that the problem is worth the effort, but many researchers face career pressures that make taking on the task of writing an operating system difficult. In corporate environments, it is often the case that research activities must be justified from a business standpoint, and it is often the case that the company's direction is driven by short-term pressures. While Roscoe could argue that it's in a company's interest to invest in operating system infrastructure that is better-equipped to deal with modern systems, it may be cheaper for the company, at least in the short term, to just modify Linux and call it a day. Pre-tenured academics such as grad students, postdocs, and assistant professors have to deal with the "publish or perish" game. Perhaps a professor who already has tenure could pursue an operating system project, but even with tenure there's still the matter of getting grant money, and the grad students who contribute to it are often concerned about their own research careers; they are just starting the publication game. Maybe if we had corporate labs these days that functioned more like golden-era Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and maybe if we had an academic environment with less pressure to publish steady results at top venues, there'd be more researchers willing to take risks and build operating systems with new designs rather than modifying Linux.