September 18, 1998

A Student's Dream of Creating A New Operating System Encounters Problems

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Led by a 16-year-old Canadian college student, a small group of computer-savvy Internet users from countries around the world has been quietly working on a project that is either visionary or foolhardy -- building an operating system that could one day challenge Microsoft's Windows.

But the child prodigy and his band of coders are also learning the difficulties of keeping an international team of volunteers together: An argument that broke out last month could doom the ambitious