> 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

> 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.