'capabilities' or a plea for consistent terminology

[Kris Kennaway]

On Tue, 18 Apr 2000 jont at us.ibm.com wrote:

> Unfortunately for everybody the posix.1e committee labelled
> kernel-privileges 'capabilities'.
> 
> Anybody vaguely aware of access control models would realise that
> they are a shallow fascimilie to real capabilities.
> [ See www.eros-os.org for an OS that really uses capabilities. ]

OTOH, EROS seem to refer to their implementation as "pure capabilities" at
least in some of the papers I have read. In the UNIX world, where it's
taken for granted that not everything is implemented as a capability
token, I think it's quite reasonable to refer to "kernel privileges" as
"capabilities" provided we're not mixing discussion of both types of
system. In other words, it should be obvious from context.

On a purely practical level, I don't think you'd get people to type out
"posix.1e capabilities" every time they want to refer to the concept :-)

Kris

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