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> I'm sure the emergence of other open-source operating systems (Linux and BSD) also contributed to the drop in interest? At that time, MINIX had a proprietary

by boricj 2y ago

> I'm sure the emergence of other open-source operating systems (Linux and BSD) also contributed to the drop in interest? At that time, MINIX had a proprietary license (it wasn't open-source until 2000) and its stated purpose was being a teaching tool for education, not being a production operating system. I can't find the quote itself, but I recall Tanenbaum once said something along the lines of "Turns out I do want to turn MINIX3 into a product, it just took me thirty years to realize it!" (please don't quote me on that unless I manage to dig up the actual quote). > If you were teaching an OS class in the late 1980s/early 1990s and wanted to have students work on and compile the source code of a UNIX-like system, using desktop PCs of the era, Minix was pretty much it wasn't it? Nowadays, xv6 fills that niche. Recent versions of MINIX3 arguably outgrew that with the switch over to the NetBSD userland.

SoftTalker 2y ago
> At that time, MINIX had a proprietary license Thanks, I didn't remember that but now that you say it that sounds right. Still, I think it was one of the few ways students at the time could inspect the code of a complete OS, modify it, recompile it, and run their changes, all on the PC that many of them had at home or in classrooms.