It's the beginning of a kernel. It may expand in the future, but to me, calling it an OS is like building a door and calling it a house. It's inaccurate and it makes it sound greater than it currently is. I on the other hand do not want to make it sound less great of course, but what we call things does matter.
I got to reading some of the articles about a year ago. At first I had the same reaction. But I noticed that many people seem to think a kernel and OS are the same thing. I can't really blame the author for attracting more readers.
They are great articles in the end, very nice reads. Some of them going a long way into the details. Recommended to anyone interested in kernels (or to learn how a kernel is not an OS :))
They're only the same in that they're both a kernel in Rust: the parent blog is an educational/exploratory OS, whereas Redox seems to be aiming for real-world use and not pedagogy.
This is not evangelism. Would you say that about a kernel in OCaml or Haskell?
Experimenting with safer language choices and see how that might help writing a kernel is a fun exercise. I am glad that Phil shared these articles, I learned a bunch from it.