How Long Will Arch last?

Question

Hi, my question here is not to ridicule (or otherwise designed to offend anyone) but one of concern. Many distributions have a viable economic model which helps ensure that the distro can survive (Fedora is one prime example). The fact that Fedora has the backing of Red Hat means that it is almost always asured funding. Ubuntu is also moving in this general direction (although their model does not seem as reliable as Red Hat's yet.) What gurrantee do we have that Arch can last for many decades to come? The Arch devs are real people with real jobs. As far as I know they do not actually get and money from Arch Linux. What sustains Arch ( pays for servers etc.) Is it simply donations? Can Arch survive soley off of donations?
What are your thoughts and ideas do you have on how to make Arch a self sustaining distro while also keeping it free? Finally if Arch falls apart what would you do?
THIS IS HYPOTHETICAL THIS IN NO MEANS IMPLIES THAT ARCH IS GOING UNDER ANY TIME SOON!
( I would also like to take this time to conragulate the Arch devs for coming this far and thank them for all their work it is much appreciated.)

Answer 1

Gullible Jones wrote:... There's also Unununium (no kernel, damned if I know how!) ...
Read the FAQ (Introduction page) for more info about Unununium:
http://unununium.org/introduction
Something interesting:
On what platforms does Unununium run?
The latest plan is to implement Unununium as a Linux userspace process. Linux is a stable, available, well documented program which eliminates most of the mundane, uncreative aspects of usual OS development such as writing hardware drivers. It also provides an easy mode of execution, with a developed debugger such as gdb, and fast boot times, since there is no need for a full hardware reboot. This makes development much easier.
Running on Linux has disadvantages as well. Probably most significantly, some things are slower. For a slower speed in execution, we get a faster speed in development. Some day it would be nice to reduce overhead, but that's something that will wait until there is something running.
For some reason or another, this choice of platform leads people to question if Unununium can really be an OS. Of course, it really depends on how "OS" is defined. Unununium is an environment and a design common to all programs which depend on it, and in this sense might be considered an OS.