> there'd be more researchers willing to take risks and build operating systems with new designs rather than modifying Linux. I don't know if that would be the

> there'd be more researchers willing to take risks and build operating systems with new designs rather than modifying Linux. I don't know if that would be the case. While Bell Labs and Xerox PARC produced a lot of very interesting/useful research a lot of it was tied up in corporate licensing for decades. The corpse of AT&T Unix has been haunting the industry for decades and cost many millions of dollars in lawsuits. Linux ate the world largely because anyone could do what they wanted with it. Modifying or building on top of Linux will get you a very long way on commodity hardware you can get at Best Buy down the street for $200. You can spend a lot more time on your target of research rather than having to build the whole underlying system. If you've got some genius idea for a process scheduler instead of writing a whole kernel and whatever hardware drivers you need you can just hack it into Linux. You can then distribute it easily to other researchers or testers since it's just patches on a kernel they've already got running. I'm not saying Linux is the end-all be-all of OS design or systems research is pointless. It's just a pretty good starting point for a lot of research since it is free and quite capable on its own. As a researcher you get a lot of capability out of the box and a whole ecosystem of development tools all ready to use.