@Hello Aki, I actually tend to think that you have some valid point on this. Its probably the way you have put it that is not the most acceptable form :). I was hoping not to come back to this thread but, here we go ..... First of all, one of the most important contributions you can make to F/OSS is actually USING (as in a total end-user, think open office, Apache ....) the free / open software. From then on, you will get a general feel of where you can start giving other contributions like code / documentation / money, etc. The assumption you are making is that each of us is a coder. I highly doubt that, but that does not mean any of us is less important The second issue, and which is where I agree with you just remotely is that the field of Operating system research has actually stagnated. Just think of it, most if not all "modern" O.Ss are implemented in a language that was written almost 40 years ago (C and by extension C++). The follow a design originally created around the same time (AT & T UNIX) and therefore carry all the flaws (and strengths) of the said systems. It would be interesting to note that some guys have been bothered by this trend and have gone ahead to create alternate systems, which unfortunately have not been able to pick up, thanks to UNIX wild success :) Examples are plan 9 [ http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/about.html ] ( Dennis Ritchie used this system as his main platform since the mid-eighties till the time of his recent death ), Inferno { the two are distributed operating systems} MINIX (a UNIX compliant system that is a micro-kernel as opposed to UNIX's monolithic design) and BeOS, recently re-incarnated as Haiku-OS [ *haiku*-* os*.org ] whichs is a hybrid kernel. One a more personal note, I find it interesting that you are bothered with guys using a "reverse-engineered" kernel, while you claim to be a keen C# developer. Everyone knows that C# is a just a happy clone of SUN JAVA by Microsoft .... I wonder if you sleep well at night with this knowledge ;-D Martin.