Reminds me of this:<p><a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navrozov-moments.html" rel="nofollow">http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/07/my-navr...</a><p><i>The lily needed no gilding at all, and it certainly did not need to be nanofabricated from isotopically pure, individually selected gold atoms. Academic CS researchers at the time, for whatever ridiculous reason (probably something to do with microkernels), thought that there should be many more fine-grained security transitions in an OS environment. In fact if anything the trend is away from multiuser computing and toward virtualized or "shared-nothing" designs in which communication between protection domains is minimal.</i>
Research needs to go into secure programming environments, not secure operating systems. The vast majority of horrible security flaws never come within a mile of the kernel.
This title says that funding is for secure operating system research. Contents seems like its for making minix better. I am very skeptical about operating system that fixes its bugs. It may become one more multics project. Though micro kernel looks really good in theory, neither minix nor hurd have taken off like linux or FreeBSD
Research needs to be done into better operating systems, but I don't think it is worth implementing too much of them.<p>Minix, from what I have read, isn't going to be a sufficient enough advance to get the man on the street to adopt it. For that to be true it would have to significantly easier to manage. While he advocates the principle of least authority, he isn't currently innovating on how that authority gets passed on to the programs. A lack of mechanism generally means it is up to the user to do so, which puts some work load and cognitive effort on the user.
So that's €2.5 million for 5 people for 5 years. Assuming they already own computers, that's €100,000/year each, and they don't even need to produce anything at the end of it. Nice work if you can get it!<p>Remind me again why we're a member of the EU?