> an OS without limits, built to be open from the ground up - with as open of a development process as possible.<p>I see the benefit of documenting each step. The result will be a pretty great tutorial, or at least a very interesting series of blog posts. But what is closed about the development of the current distros?<p>I hope that Ian is hoping to build a very different kind of distro, breaking the mold. NEXTSTEP was fundamentally a Unix, but everything about it was synthesized to create a totally new organism. Same with OS X. This kind of experimentation hasn't been attempted very much with Linux distros, which mostly amount to different installers and package managers. Etoile comes to mind, and apparently CoreOS is discarding much of the mold, but a completely new, holistically built system would be quite interesting to see. I suspect it hasn't been attempted much because the sheer amount of work is overwhelming. Writing a new shell is a lot of work. Writing a different init, shell, filesystem layout, and window manager, all unified around some new concepts, would be a lot of work. If that's what he's aiming to do, the result will be really interesting to use and learn from.