About
Building an OS from first principles
OpenTo's thesis: today's operating systems accumulate cruft because the unit of distribution is the persistent application. Remove that unit, replace it with declarative, ephemeral expression, and entire categories of problems — supply-chain attacks, version drift, storage bloat, surveillance baked into pre-installed apps — disappear.
The project is pre-build. This document, the PRD, and the architectural vision exist. The code does not — yet. We're assembling the core team of 8–10 people for an 18-month build to v1.0, with a working developer demo at month 6.
Status: Pre-build — for review and team formation
Core team roles
Technical Lead / Chief Architect
Deep OS experience, capability-based security. Owns architecture end to end.
Senior Systems Engineers (Rust) × 2
Production Rust, Wasm runtimes, Linux systems programming.
NixOS Specialist
NixOS contribution history, custom distribution experience.
Frontend / UI Engineer
Rust GUI (iced/egui) or embedded web UI in Wayland environments.
Protocol Designer
Prior experience designing open protocols (IETF, W3C, Matrix, ActivityPub).
Security Engineer
Applied cryptography, supply-chain security, Sigstore familiarity.
ML Engineer (part-time)
Local LLM deployment, llama.cpp, quantization, intent parsing.
DevRel / Community Lead
Open source evangelism, developer documentation, conference presence.
Interested? The RFC process is open and contributions are welcome.
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