# Sponsor StarshipOS

*Draft for Ko-fi, Patreon, Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors (2026-10-28). Captain Bob to edit
into his own voice before posting.*

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## An operating system that can prove what it is

I'm Bob James. I spent years in industry validating software: proving to auditors that a system
does what it says. Most of that work was reconstructing evidence that should have existed from
day one. So I'm building the system I always wanted to validate.

**StarshipOS** is a bare-metal operating system built on FORTH. It boots straight from UEFI
firmware, without Linux or any OS under it, and runs **StarForth v4**, a small stack-machine engine
inspired by Chuck Moore's F18 chip. Every piece of it is built to carry its own evidence:

- **Every component has a fingerprint.** Software ships in *capsules*, identified by the hash of
  their content. The running system prints those hashes at every boot, so "is this the system that
  was tested?" is a check, not a belief.
- **Every boot tests itself.** 538 self-tests run before the first prompt, on three CPU
  architectures (x86-64, ARM64, RISC-V), and all three must agree on the same dictionary hash.
- **Nothing runs without its owner.** No identity stick, no prompt. Access is controlled word by
  word.
- **Proofs, not promises.** The design is being specified in Isabelle/HOL, a machine-checked proof
  system, with every assumption named and every unproven part labelled as unproven.

## Where it is today

- Boots in emulation (QEMU) on all three architectures, passing every self-test.
- A USB stick image that boots a PC is in progress now. The first real-hardware boot, on a small
  x86 PC, is next.
- After that: the engine on an FPGA (a Zynq-7020 board), with the long-term goal of proven F18-style
  cores in silicon.
- The adaptive runtime underneath, the Steady State Machine, is patent pending.

## What your support does

This is a one-person project run on a retirement budget. Sponsorship pays for test hardware, cables
and boards, patent filing fees, and the hours that go into it.

## Tiers

- **Crew, $5/month:** my thanks, and the monthly devlog a few days early.
- **Officer, $15/month:** the above, plus your name in the project's credits file.
- **Bridge, $50/month:** the above, plus a monthly live Q&A call with me about the project.

*(No physical rewards yet. When the bootable stick is ready, supporters will hear about it first.)*

## Follow along

- Devlog: *[link]*
- YouTube: *[link]*
- Source: *[link to the public repository, if and when it is public]*