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I'm pretty ignorant of the timeline and I'm only going off of some vague memory and what Wikipedia says. Note that the OP is from 1992, so Tanenbaum was arguin

I'm pretty ignorant of the timeline and I'm only going off of some vague memory and what Wikipedia says. Note that the OP is from 1992, so Tanenbaum was arguing for micro-kernels well before the Minix 2 1997 release. From Wikipedia's entry on Minix 1.5 [0]: > MINIX 1.5, released in 1991, ... . There were also unofficial ports to Intel 386 PC compatibles (in 32-bit protected mode), ... I found an article online that dates from 1999 but referencing a comp.os.minix post from Tanenbaum from 1992 where Tanenbaum clearly states MINIX is a microkernel system [1]: > MINIX is a microkernel-based system. Further, I don't see any reference of Minix 2 being released as FOSS in 1997. Wikipedia claims Minix 2.0.3 released in May 2001 was the first version of MINIX released under a BSD-3 license [0]: > Version 2.0.3 was released in May 2001. It was the first version after MINIX had been relicensed under the BSD-3-Clause license, which was retroactively applied to all previous versions. From Wikipedia's entry on "History of Linux" [2]: > In 1991, ..., Linus Torvalds began a project that later became the Linux kernel. ... . Development was done on MINIX using the GNU C Compiler. > On 25 August 1991, he [Linus torvalds] ... announced ... in another posting to the comp.os.minix newsgroup > PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, ... So, I don't really know if Tanenbaum was talking "in theory" about where best to allocate effort and/or if Minix 1/2 were actually a microkernel design, but it seems so. I'm also pretty ignorant of whether Minix 1/2 could be used on 80286 or 80386 chips. Though I'm very fuzzy on the details it does seem like the sentiment remains. It looks like Torvalds work on Linux was, either directly or in large part, due to the restrictive licensing of Minix [3]: > Frustrated by the licensing of Minix, which at the time limited it to educational use only, he began to work on his operating system kernel, which eventually became the Linux kernel. In a 1997 interview, Torvalds says: > Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix#MINIX_1.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix#MINIX_1.5 [1] https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/opensources/book/appa.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Creation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Creation [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20070826212454/http://www.tlug.jp/docs/linus.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070826212454/http://www.tlug.j...

lproven 2y ago
> I'm pretty ignorant of the timeline and I'm only going off of some vague memory and what Wikipedia says. I can see that. That's what I was addressing. This was not a technical contest. It was not about tech merit. It was not about rivalry between competing systems. They were not competing systems. They never have been and still are not. When both Linux and Minix were options on the same hardware, Linux was FOSS and capable but incomplete, Minix was not FOSS, not capable, but did work and was available, just not redistributable. It was not a competition. AST was talking about the ideas and goals of OS research when he wrote. Then, later, in subsequent versions, he first made Minix really FOSS (ignoring quibbling about second-decimal point versions), and then later, he rewrote the whole thing as a microkernel as a demo that it was possible. It is arguably more complete and more functional than the GNU HURD, with a tiny fraction of the time or people. Minix 3 was AST making his point by doing what he had advocated in that thread, about a decade and a half earlier.

lproven 2y ago

> I'm pretty ignorant of the timeline and I'm only going off of some vague memory and what Wikipedia says. I can see that. That's what I was addressing. This was not a technical contest. It was not about tech merit. It was not about rivalry between competing systems. They were not competing systems. They never have been and still are not. When both Linux and Minix were options on the same hardware, Linux was FOSS and capable but incomplete, Minix was not FOSS, not capable, but did work and was available, just not redistributable. It was not a competition. AST was talking about the ideas and goals of OS research when he wrote. Then, later, in subsequent versions, he first made Minix really FOSS (ignoring quibbling about second-decimal point versions), and then later, he rewrote the whole thing as a microkernel as a demo that it was possible. It is arguably more complete and more functional than the GNU HURD, with a tiny fraction of the time or people. Minix 3 was AST making his point by doing what he had advocated in that thread, about a decade and a half earlier.