Release of the Sculpt CE operating system Mar 28, 2019

The fourth version of our Genode-based general-purpose OS marks the final stage of the plan we envisioned one and a half years ago and is subtitled as "Community Experience" (CE).

The background of this slogan is our ambition to remove the need for any middleman between developers and users. In contrast to today's mainstream OSes, which rely on ultimately trusted distributions or app stores, Sculpt works completely federated. The integrity of the installed software is protected by digital signatures of the software providers while each piece of software is sandboxed both at installation time and at runtime. This way, users don't need to be faithful but enter a position of ultimate control.

This is capability-based security at work!

As explained in the accompanying blog posting, Sculpt CE features a new user interface to integrate software into the running system and to reveal the trusted computing base of each component:

Sculpt CE is available as a ready-to-use disk image bootable from a USB stick. The release is accompanied with comprehensive documentation that covers both the use the system and the philosophy behind it.

Without a middleman between software providers and users in Sculpt OS, there is the obvious question: How can a user find software? This is where our recently started community blog - Genodians.org - enters the picture.

It gives developers a way to announce new software while users can share their perspectives and ideas. Just like Sculpt OS, the content of Genodians.org is managed in a federated fashion. In the previous newsletter, we already announced the beta version of this blogging platform. In the meantime, we launched the site officially. We are happy that there are already more than 10 authors participating.