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The way Andy Tanenbaum tells the story is that he wanted to make sure that every student who got a copy of the operating systems book, would also get a copy of
by phicoh 5y ago
The way Andy Tanenbaum tells the story is that he wanted to make sure that every student who got a copy of the operating systems book, would also get a copy of the source and binaries of MINIX. For this reason he insisted that the publisher, Prentice Hall, would deliver floppies with book.
Prentice Hall wasn't too keen on doing that but gave in. However, as it normally works with publishers, that also meant transfering the copyrights to them.
There is another part and that is that Andy Tanenbaum didn't consider MINIX a serious operating system. It was designed as a teaching aid. Until MINIX-3 he actively resisted adding complications, like a virtual memory system. So even with an open source license, it probably would have taken a fork and rebranding to turn it into a more serious operating system.
Finally, turning a micro-kernel system like MINIX into a modern unix system is far from trivial. So it is not clear how well an improved version of MINIX would have competed with *BSD.
- marcodiego 5y agoLinux was mostly a toy at first. I see no reason MINIX couldn't be as successful.
- anthk 5y agoLinux in late 90's was a beast. FVWM+RXVT used far less memory and CPU than the tipical SUN Station and with a fraction of the price.
- p_l 5y agoMinix 2 design pretty much ensured it couldn't be anything more - a lot of early Linux code was about replacing Minix code with something that made it less of a joke, and the experience was fuel for the tanenbaum-linus flamewar (for example, Linus had reentrant, "multithreaded" I/O whereas Minix couldn't due to how it handled I/O). It was only Minix 3 when care was taken to include possibly more complex but important techniques instead of forsaking them for simplicity
- edgyquant 5y agoNot really. Linus thought he was building a toy kernel but as soon as it was released it became a real OS as people got it working on their systems, got all GNU programs running, etc. The X windowing system was ported in less than a year so it was a full fledged OS immediately. As for minux, at the time Linux was released microkernels weren’t considered practical outside of research OSs until the mid-to-late 90s and even today Mac OS is the only widely used micro kernel OS. This is a big topic of Linus debate with Tannenbaum. I don’t recall the exact reasons but iirc microkernels we’re/are slower than a monolith and at a time when computing power was much lower they didn’t make sense for workstations.