Since my last attempt to explain this failed a bit (I was unclear so some people didn't get it), I have rewritten it a bit to make it a little easier, with a fun example this time as well.
The name?
The name "Lifeware" comes from the words "Life" and "Software".
What is Lifeware?
Lifeware is much like "life simulators", and is meant to in some way "mimic" a life form.
How it mimics the life form is of course up to the person coding the Lifeware, but the idea is to use the operating system as the world where the life form lives in.
It's all very simple really, since there are not very many rules to how one builds a Lifeware. To make it even easier, let's give an example that I like.
Most people have seen the "Alien" movies, where the so called Xenomorhs roam the coridors, taking humans as if they were fat kids in a candy store. Now, let's say you want to "mimic" this life form and create a Lifeware out of it. You would have to start with analyzing the Xenomorphs behaviour as much as possible from the movies and find keywords. So what do we know about Xenomorphs from the Alien movies? Well, they operate with an hierarichal structure with the Queen at the top and all the Drones at the bottom. The Queen is mostly stationed in the hive where she lay her eggs. The eggs then hatch after a while (conveniently enough always when there's a human around) and from them the "facehugger" is born. The facehuggers attack humans and lay eggs inside of them which eventually grows into a parasite (the baby Alien which can be either a Drone or a Queen). Now, the Drones do whatever the Queen tells them to do but usually they hunt for food or hosts that they take back to the hive.
Now that I have analyzed the "basics" (or as much as I could think of at this point) about the behaviour pattern of the Alien, I can start thinking about ways to implement this in code. It's all about having a crazy imagination and finding your creative side. Personally I like to use creative methods that do not harm the system, but at the same time I do not like to be restricted by it (The Alien has to eat! And what do we usually have a lot of? Files of course! And I don't think a Xenomorph really cares about what the status of the human it eats has, it's a hunter that only sees the human as its prey). Due to this, the normal user will see this as Malware and try to get rid of it (if it for some reason resides in his/her system), but it is not to be confused with Malware, since Malware is created to harm the system or the user, while Lifeware is created simply to "exist", but of course the purpose of the Lifewares existance is decided by the creator (No connections to religion what so ever, anyone who makes connections to it is stupid). The real beauty of Lifeware will mostly only be appreciated by the people who understands the functions behind it (programmers for example).
Anyway, so how do we implement all this as code? Well, like I said, use your imagination! For example, each entity of the three "facehugger, queen, drone" can be created as 3 separate applications with similar functions. You first have the Queen application, and when it first starts, it checks its own status (you might want to give it health points and such to make the expansion possibilities even greater). After this the Queen literally moves itself around the system until it finds a good place (a folder for example) and creates a hive (a folder!) where it moves into and stays (when I say move, I literally mean that it moves its own file around). After this the queen lays some "eggs", or in this case files with some data (data about the egg, like how long intil it hatches etc), if there are no drones on the system, the queen sleeps, and checks the status of the eggs (reads the files) once in a while. When the time is right for the eggs to hatch, the "Queen process" removes the egg and creates a new file, the facehugger, which is another application with the functions you have specified. Well, you should see where I'm going with this.
Personally I want to be able to interact with my Lifeware and monitor them for fun.
So I plan to create a separata program that checks the system for a specific Lifeware and then displays status of them. It could also give the possibility to give the drones the same commands as the Queen.
But remember, it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt
If you want to code something like this, remember to think about why you are doing it, so that it does not turn into some evil malware. A good way to make sure of this is to always have a kill switch for all your Lifeware, like a separate application that spawns whenever you start your Lifeware, and that when started, can kill and remove all the Lifeware on the machine.
You are the kid and the OS is your sandbox
