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Minix Now Under BSD License
Minix is now Free Software! Andrew Tanenbaum posted to the comp.os.minix newsgroup yesterday announcing: "Better late than never. I finally got permission from Prentice Hall to change the MINIX license to the BSD license. The lawyers sort of sat on this for two years." You can read the full posting on deja, as well.
Does this means we get to witness another LT/AT flame war?
I really enjoyed reading the Tanenbaum vs. Torvalds debate in the back of Open Sources. As much as many of A.T.'s arguments seem short-sighted in retrospect, he had several very good points about Linux (e.g. it was not portable, it could not deal with externally maintained extensions, and other things that had to be fixed in the 2.0 and later series). I think it will be well worth the community's time to re-read the Minix source and figure out if there's any more lessons to be learned, and/or incorporate the features that make sense.
Question, though: does Minix still have a future as a teaching tool, or do OSes like Linux and *BSD make it obsolete? I would certianly like to see a good textbook that teaches OS design, using the source to a modern OS as examples....
BSD is designed to allow people the freedom to do what they want with code. GPL is designed to keep code free. These types of "freedom" are really very different.
BSD actually causes many fewer headaches, because the code can be used in closed source products with no worries over licensing issues and that sort of thing. And of course, you can always start with some BSD code, make some changes, and release the resulting code under GPL.
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Minix was not meant for small devices. Minix is meant to be understandable to the students in an Operating System's Design class in one semester. The only real difference now is that the source is free to people who aren't taking an OS class( IIRC professors were allowed to copy and distribute the source to students in their class).
treke
Minix is Linux's daddy, and is is finally available under a Good license. I haven't seen any "too little too late!" comments, which is good, because it's not too little too late. Minix runs on the 80[2]86 whereas Linux still doesn't AFAIK (ELKS doesn't seem too far along as of yet). Perhaps we will see an increase in Minix activity now that it's BSD licensed.
Although I do think this whole thing is funny, perhaps Linus will post a "MINIX is obsolete!" comment on the comp.os.minix newsgroup, that would be priceless! =)
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Did you even read the post? It answers all of your questions:
MINIX is much smaller than Linux and might well be suitable as the operating system for a watch, camera, or transistor radio. The manufacturer of, say, a watch might really not want to provide a CD-ROM with the source code with each watch or even a web site with the source code, as being too much trouble. The new MINIX license says you can distribute source if you want to, but you don't have to.
So, that's what it's good for, and that's why he didn't pick the GPL. 'Nuff said.
Who would have though it would end like this :)
I'll respect this guy's choice of a BSD-like license over the GPL. But the reason he chose it shows an obvious lack of understanding of the GPL.
For those who haven't read the post, he believes that a person releasing something under the GPL must include the source code with every copy. Since Minix is intended for embedded purposes, he figures companies would have to include the source with the device (rather impractical for a wristwatch).
What he doesn't get is that you do not have to include the source code with the binaries. All the GPL says is that if anyone wants the source, you have to make it available for no more than the cost of actually getting the source to them. Since distributing the source over the Net is basically free, authors have almost always distributed the source with the app, but that's not the only way to do it. An embedded device maker could, for example, include a mail-in card for a source CD with the device, for the cost of shipping and handling. A neat, tidy way for people who want the source to get it, without having to include the source with every single device. This is not unlike the way it was done before the Net took off.
This guy's the author of Minix, and he can put it under any license he wants, I suppose. But he could at least have based his choice off of informed reasoning. If the trouble of including a CD-ROM with a wristwatch was the only concern, then there was no reason at all to choose BSD over GPL (or vice-versa).
Seriously, outside of Operating Systems 101, who uses Minix? :-)
Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design
right here
when Push Comes to Shove
OK. To all the complainers that it isn't GPL'ed: Anything that is (non advertising) BSD can be incorporated into GPL. In other words, GPL provides a subset of the freedoms provided by BSD.
Now, follow my directions. 1. Draw a big circle. 2. Label it "BSD". 3. Draw a little circle inside the big circle. 4. Label it GPL. 5. Draw another little circle inside the big circle, but be very careful to make sure that it doesn't touch the other little circle. 6. Label the second little circle "closed source".
Now, what have we learned from this little exercise? We learned that BSD is a big circle that encompasses both free and proprietary software. It's a rising tide that lifts all boats, not a whirlpool that sucks them down.
Let's sing a little song: "Now I know my BSD's, won't you come and play with me..."
Got it kiddies? Good. Now it's nap time.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
In the long run, I believe this will be extremely good for Open Source and Linux, given the fact that alot of inexperienced people now will be drawn to hacking and learning from this OS, which is just the right size to quickly learn the fun of programming OSes. Go Tanembaum, go Minix! =]
A device made out of individual transistors and capable of running MINIX would be... interesting, to say the least.
Actually, you cannot release BSD code under the GPL. The GPL specifically prohibits this.
Actually I did read the article... and he says it might be suitable for small devices. Allow me to quote the Andrew Tanenbaum, "It is simply focused on the target area it was always focused on: education." http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/ast_home_page/faq.htm. Linux and the BSDs have never really been in competition with Minix because of the goal to keep it simple.
Normally I hate feeding trolls, but this guy could have fooled someone who new nothing about Minix
treke
Why is this flame bait at +4?
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insists that it be called GNU/Minix.
Not for any real reason. Just because he is a bearded dictator with a bunch of stupid impressionable geeks following his every word.
It is really wonderful to see a major project released under the BSD license instead of the GPL or a home-rolled license. Publicitly like that will only help the BSD crowd and having more code under the BSD license is just grand. And of course, it is nice to see someone realizing that the BSD license is absolutely perfect for the majority of projects. The GPL only causes problems with minor projects.
Also, I think a reason (though I didn't see it listed) to use a BSD license is the fact a lot of the utilities in Minix have really old BSD copyrights in them. They probably were derived from some ancient BSD tapes and cannot be put under the GPL. (Yes, I am aware of UCB's pulling of the advertising clause but you would have to get every person who contributed to that code in Minix to agree to pulling the advertising clause from the forked Minix version. Even if one person said no, it can never be GPL'd.)
I found the following in a reply of Linus in the AT-LT discussion:
:-)
If you write programs for linux today, you shouldn't have too many surprises when you just recompile them for Hurd in the 21st century.
So, where is the HURD??
FreeBSD really rocks,
But only Intel / Alpha box.
The 'Net' one runs on so much more.
The 'Open' one is more secure.
Now I know my BSD's. Won't you come and play with me?
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If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
You know what?! Someone should take the Minix code and add a bunch of stuff to it, like virtual memory and increased driver support. In a few years, you might even have a new operating system that would take the world by storm.
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a funny comment: 1 karma
an insightful comment: 1 karma
a good old-fashioned flame: priceless
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
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http://x27.deja.com/ [ST_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=607967341&fmt=text None of that mess, just text.
The original BSD license with it's, as the FSF puts it, "obnoxious BSD advertising clause" is incompatible with GPL. The modified BSD license, which is almost certainly the license being here, is fully compatible with GPL. The FSF states this specifically.
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"Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a high grade for such a design :-)"
8-]
<http://www.deja.com/[S T_rn=ps]/getdoc.xp?AN=607967341&fmt=text>.
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It's a fully featured PC with a 8088 and 128K ram (I've got a 256K upgrade, making a total of 384K), which has to double as disk space as well.
How big is it? Does it support ramdisks?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Man, it's so much trouble to put your patches on a website nowadays ... I mean, it's not like my 10 year old cousin could make her own webpage on Geocitites ... oh wait a minute, she has ... nevermind.
Just a quick note before I start, it's interesting how only one person who is accusing me of trolling isn't an AC. Makes me wonder who should be accusing whom.
No, that post isn't a troll. Or at least, it wasn't intended as such. And I stick by my claims. The author does state that maintaining a Website with the source would be "too much trouble." Right. Consider: embedded devices tend to be static in nature. There isn't much in the way of upgradability, particularly not in terms of the operating system. This means that things like CVS aren't that necessary; the OS as used by the company isn't going to change much if at all.
Oh, and then there's CD-ROM distribution. How difficult is it to burn a CD with source on it? Not very hard at all, actually, seeing as you're only including the source for one thing (when you're including the source to many things, as is done with a Linux distro, that's another subject). Plus, there's this little thing called volume. This is not Linux we're talking about. Who's going to want the source for the OS on a wristwatch? Some will, certainly, but I'd be shocked if any company taking this route got more than five orders a month for source CD's, if that many. Is five CD's a month any kind of a burden? The costs alone are lower than the margin of error in the account books of many corporations. I'll grant that distributing a CD with every device would be troublesome indeed. But that's not what we're talking about anyway.
I didn't intend to troll (sorry to disappoint the trolls out there; I have no intention of joining your ranks), and if anyone was offended by this post then I'm sorry you feel that way. I had no intention of offending anyone. But I do stick by my claims.
Quote: "...Linux itself, product of an experimenting computer science student, is originally based on Minix code and research."
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There is a very interesting FAQ written by Andrew Tanenbaum on Tanenbaum's site. Amongst other answers and questions, I found this ones:
What do you think of Linux?
I have never used it. People tell me that if you like lots of bells and whistles, it is a nice system. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Linus for producing it. Before there was Linux there was MINIX, which had a 40,000-person newsgroup, most of whom were sending me email every day. I was going crazy with the endless stream of new features people were sending me. I kept refusing them all because I wanted to keep MINIX small enough for my students to understand in one semester. My consistent refusal to add all these new features is what inspired Linus to write Linux. Both of us are now happy with the results. The only person who is perhaps not so happy is Bill Gates.
What's wrong with LaTeX?
Nothing, but real authors use troff.
What do you think of MS-DOS?
It is better than Windows. At least it has a command line interface, albeit a pretty feeble one.
Ehm... I guess Tanenbaum likes simplicity a bit too much. I mean, he is convinced that a GUI can not make any improvement at all. For example, I use Lyx for making my thesis and I am convinced it is able to produce real quality material. Yes, it's a graphical WYSIWYM frontend to LaTeX. How can anyone be convinced Lyx isn't good because of that?
I would certianly like to see a good textbook that teaches OS design, using the source to a modern OS as examples.
... but it is very implementation oriented. It also compares the implementations of modern Unixes like Solaris and BSD. A great read!
Check out "Unix Internals: The New Frontiers". It covers all the typical OS textbook topics: VM, filesystems, IPC,
cpeterso
WE DO NOT WANT YOUR COMMERCIAL SHIT. And yes we include BSD in this because it can be used in commercial software.
You say non-copyleft licenses suck. You're reading this on a text browser, right? Mac OS is proprietary buyware. Windows 9x is proprietary buyware. BeOS Personal is freebeerware but still proprietary. X Window System is X11-style free software, and so is BSD. So you're reading Slashdot on GNU/Linux with the Lynx or w3m browser, right?
If you want it to be GNU GPL, then just make a couple changes and fork off your own distro. That has been OK since June 1999, when Berkeley finally removed the advertising clause from the BSD license.
And there is commercial free software: just look at boxed distributions (e.g. Red Hat Linux) of primarily GNU GPL software.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Problem: Mac OS X has a server version that collides in namespace Product with the generic name of XFree86 Project Inc.'s product, an X server. That's why I always write "Mac OS 10" and "Mac OS 10 Server".
<offtopic>
XFree86 is making an X server for Windows. I just wonder what will happen if someone decides to make an open-source Mac OS X server.
</offtopic>
See where confusion can arise?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The license is quoted in full at the Deja archive. The advertising clause afflicted only the "old" BSD license, the language is included in the notice which rescinded this clause.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Not entirely true. At the low end, Linux is increasingly useless. A distro like Slack 4.0 doesn't run well on (say) even a 386/40 with 8M of RAM, while Minix 2.0 is surprisingly smooth on a 286/16 with 1M, and tolerable on a 640K Turbo XT.
At this time, the Linux/8086 port is crummy at best (it kept producing inexplicable disc errors for me)-- why use that for a small system when Minix works, works well, and works well TODAY?
Furthermore, I believe he noted that the lawyers held it up for two years. If it had gone as intended, this would be the free-software breakthrough of 1998. It's unfair to blame him for it being this late.
Congratulations, Mr. Tannenbaum. You've done well.
http://charged.net/tim/venn-bsd2.gif
While having a useful teaching tool is a laudable goal, there's no reason why the project couldn't fork, with one version of the kernel being a simple, understandable kernel, and the other serving as the basis for more complex (and presumably useful) designs.
Both the BSD and GPL licenses make forking possible. What the GPL does is ensure that, to the extent anyone wishes to do so, there are no legal embarrments to merging forks down the road. If a full-featured Minix (Maxix?) were to implement some trick-cool concept, that feature and it alone, could be merged back into Minix.
While fork/remerge is possible with BSD code which remains BSD licensed, proprietized development based on BSD code cannot be remerged back to the original core without explicit permission of the new copyright holder.
IMO Tanenbaum's probably too little, too late, though it would be interesting to see what shows up under system software at SourceForge over the next few months....
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Note that my post was almost two hours ahead of the one you refer to :P How could I have seen it then?
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There's no problem with having or using BSDLed software. It's only when people release something under the GPL and we get a bunch of zealots yelling "No! Not the GPV, make it BSD!" that I get annoyed.
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"I already have all the latest software."
Actually you'd have to fork off 4.4BSD-Lite2 because all of the later contributions to Free/Net/OpenBSD were made under the then-existing license (not GPL-compatible), and some of the contributors may not want their work relicensed without permission. The code owned by UCB can be (and was) relicensed by them, but code contributed by third parties can't be without the permission of all involved.
If you would actually take the trouble to _read_ the GPL (it's in a file called COPYING included in almost every piece of software that (you can legally download AND isn't a demo AND runs on Linux)), you would know the GPL DOES allow people to sell GPL'ed software. I can copy the newest Redhat and sell it for $1852 if I want to. No-one will buy it, though.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Has anyone else noticed the date on the DejaNews posting? It's exactly midnight on April the 7th. I wonder if it was deliberate...
Really? Are you told if it was moderated down for being "flamebait" or "overrated" at least?
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They do roll over at different times.
The 90s are the years 1990 through 1999, or 1890 through 1899 if you are old enough.
The two-hudredth decade is the years 1991 through 2000 inclusive, which we are still in.
The twentieth century is the years 1901 through 2000 inclusive, which we are still in.
The second millenium is the years 1001 through 2000, which we are still in.
The two-hundredth decade is almost a tounge twister, so people refer to aproximately the same time span as the 90s, which comes out a lot easier.
The thread you linked to was from late January of 1992. Linux has changed substantially since then. Concerning the arguments about Linux's monolithicity, Linux is no where near as monolithic as it once was. About portability, TONS has changed in eight years. Andy Tanenbaum says that Linux is tied fairly close to the 80x86. This has changed substantially since then. Linux is ported to two (680x0, SPARC) of the three (I don't even know what the NS3201 is) architectures mentioned there. He also says that "[w]hat is going to happen is that [RISC] will gradually take over from the 80x86 line." This has shown itself to be not true, regardless of whether it's a good thing to happen.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
"The 90s" can be read two different ways. If you mean the years from 90-99 then obviously it is not. If you mean the 9th decade of the current century, then it is. Ultimately this is simply a matter of imprecise terminology. It does nothing to change the fact that centuries are 100 year increments, and that they start with the year 1, not 0, at least in the calendar that we normally use. If you don't like that, feel free to write a new calendar, and good luck getting people to use it...
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Hardly. Mac OS 10 is a proprietary product, it may be built on Mach and thus similar to the HURD technically, it is not cross platform and it is not Open Source.
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I noted that the Minix license, as quoted, does not include the advertising clause. What part of this do you not understand?
I referred to the change notice posted by UC Berkeley because I couldn't find a copy of the full text of the earlier version of the BSD license. However, it is the same clause 3 which effects the advertising clause. You'll note (if you bother to follow the two thoughtfully provided links) that this clause three isn't present in the Minix license.
Minix was never issued under the prior version of the BSD license, so no, the change notice doesn't affect Minix. You appear to be confused on this point.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Hint: If Kerberos WAS under under MPL or APSL Microsoft would have engineered their version to be different.
Microsoft WANTS to be different, either thru gross incompentancy, or as the Halloween document outlines, to destroy standards.
Nice try at a GPL/BSD flamewar. The way to do the flamewar tho is to take an lay down a token ring of protection about yourself and say
Brett Glass
Brett Glass
Brett Glass
and the defender of the BSD licence will appear. Then, by virtue of Brett being here, a horde of GPL daemons will appear and the flames will drive out any reason from the posts!
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
RedHat was going to announce at Linux World in NYC how they had an 'embedded Linux' offering, according to infoworld.
Seems a bit odd to do that for 'a joke'.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
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"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The 9th decade of this century is [1981,1991>. You mean the 10th decade.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Try reading at Score: 1 or higher.
:-)
You miss most of the junk that way.
It's much better than just complaining.
You are, of course, correct. And boy is my face red.
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Sure, Darwin is open source. But it's not OS 10. Any more than msdos.sys and io.sys are Windows. If MSFT had opened the source for those two files when they released windows 95 would you claim it was an open source OS and there was no need for Linux anymore?
Didn't think so. So why the double standard for Apple?
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War {Unix | Linux | BeOS | FreeBSD}! Kill the Micro$o~1 pig!
Microsoft's VP of Customer Service is Helen Waite. If you are having problems with their products go to Helen Waite.
"[Minix] runs as a user program on the Macintosh and SPARC (on top of Solaris). This mode is especially convenient for people (e.g. students) who want to play with an operating system but don't want to allocate it a disk partition and keep having to reboot it.
"I was thinking that it might be useful to many people to have a version of MINIX that ran on top of Linux, as a user program. Since a version of MINIX for the SPARC already runs on Solaris as a user program, porting this to Linux might not be so hard. I am looking for a volunteer who has the time and interest to do this.
I was curious as to what ever happened with this and if anything, the results. Possibly this might be restarted or reinvigorated by this announcement of a license change?
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
So why are you all complaining?
--- Speaking only for myself,
Bah, I misstyped, I admitted my mistake, time for you to get over it. It is indeed still the 10th decade of the 20th century. There was no year 0! Don't blame me, I didn't invent the Julian Calender! If I had I would have included a year 0 and things would be a lot less confusing :P
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>They do roll over at different times.
>The 90s are the years 1990 through 1999, or 1890 through 1899 if you are old enough.
>The two-hudredth decade is the years 1991 through 2000 inclusive, which we are still in.
>The twentieth century is the years 1901 through 2000 inclusive, which we are still in.
>The second millenium is the years 1001 through 2000, which we are still in.
>The two-hundredth decade is almost a tounge
twister, so people refer to aproximately the same time span as the 90s, which comes out a lot easier.
We are not still in the 20th century. We are using a time scale based on the birth of a man. We have "supposedly" finished 2000 years since the birth of Christ. Whether or not this is a valid basis for a calendar is debatable, however, since it is the standard used, we are now in the 21 century. Centuries do not start at 1 they start at 0. Human beings are not born 1 year old. There is an arbitrary year 0. This being the day Christ was born. On your first birthday, you have been alive for 1 year. On your 10th birthday, you have been alive 10 years, not on your 11th birthday. Decades and centuries, based on the life spans of living beings, start at 0 not 1.
There is a really neato variant of minix, VM Minix or something (Can someone correct me here pls). It does have some quite competitive features, and it has .... xfree86. Ie.. An X server on a 40meg hd 8meg mem 386.
Think Thin kids!
The beauty of minix, was it was what I learned on, an XT with 40meg hd and Minix. And man... I thought it was damn cool. Linux just wasn't even on the radar in those days. If it was broke. You'd go'damn fixed it!
roll on bad old days.
Oh yeah.. I'm happy.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I think another really big problem on slashdot is the number of weak ass, donkey-humping, shit eating bitches who don't know how to use profanity effectively!
We'll use this post as an example. Let's see, essentially we have mother fucker and cocksucker. Gee, those really hurt my feelings! Come on people, is that the best you can do? I bet your typical 2nd grader is more creative then that!
Now lets rework a portion of this post to demonstrate sharper more effective profanity. Let's use the lead sentence for our example.
Initially it reads:
Yo motherfucker, why don't you take your ignorance and blow it out your ass?
Now, does this really effectively communicate your disdain for this individuals post? I think not.
Let's try this:
Listen here you uncle fucking, goat luv'en, dick sucking, piece o' shit, cretin. Why don't you keep your lame, weak ass, dumb fuck, stank ass opinions to your bitch-ass self.
Now, the person who read this as part of a reply to their post will have no doubts as to the person's feelings toward them or their post. That lack of ambiguity is really what you are striving for.
Anything worth doing is worth doing right. So remember, next time you're tempted to throw a bit of profanity into you post be a little creative. Don't fall back to using the same tired-ass, shit-stale, piss-stank goat berries that every other lame, down-syndrome looking, pig fucking retard on the net has already used. Push yourself a little, the results are well worth it.
Over and out.
Yea, but then you miss a lot of the good posts from ACs who have a good point. A lot of the pro MS stuff gets posted by ACs and /. moderators rarely bother to mark them up. Thats why I keep saying that slashdot needs to retool its moderation system a bit.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Does anybody bother to read the entire post anymore? I had a few questions. That might deserve an offtopic (fine if you don't want to answer my question) but I doubt it deserves a flamebait. Or were you just reading the first two lines?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Does it really matter anymore if newer Linux distros no longer run well on old 386's? Maybe for what most of the 386's and low end 486's are being used for these days the single floppy sort of distros are more suitable?
As cheap as hardware is today, if you were designing say, an embeded device or handheld, would you start with anything less than a 486 core? I don't think there is much of any technical or financial reason to do so anymore. If you are designing something from scratch and don't need x86 compatibility, there are other processors that probably make more sense from the standpoints of cost, power consumption and heat generation anyway.
For home experimentation and dedicated purpose uses these days when you can get about as many 486's as you can haul away for FREE (as in beer) these days, why would anyone care about 386's, let alone 286's? A Turbo XT is more suitable as a museum piece than anything that anyone would want to use.
I know from experience because I've got stacks of 486's in my basement that people were happy to have me haul away for them.
Minix may have been interesting back when hardware was expensive, but it just doesn't seem that relevant anymore. The question is basically whether the low end you are talking about even exists anymore. Even in 1998, I just don't see how Minix would have been that much of a breakthrough. I think its day was more towards the early 90's, and for anything other than a tool for OS kernel design it looks to me like its day has been past for a long time.
I wonder if people have lost all critical thinking skills when they pen sentences like:
People who release code under the BSD license are essentially giving you code to do with as you see fit. It doesn't get any free-er than that. So what if someone else modifies the code, why would you think that you are entitled to their changes? You don't pay their salary. If they wish to donate their code back, terrific, I think it's a wonderful thing to do. But regardless of that, they can't remove ANY freedom that you have with the code as distributed. Make your own free software project out of it. Modify it. Sell it. Embed it. And stop bitching that you are entitled to something that you didn't write but that somehow you feel you deserve.I had email arguments of this nature with RMS over a decade ago, there is nothing in this argument which is new. I suspect that Professor Tanenbaum understands this issue far better than you might imagine. I salute his efforts to make his excellent software available to people to use as they see fit.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
Tanenbaum owes neither you nor the "free UNIX community" anything.
Tanenbaum has contributed a huge amount to the programming industry has it is, not only with his contribution of MINIX (which as a freely available scaled down UNIX was not only ahead of its time but has helped thousands of programmers learn about OS programming, many of whom have used this knowledge to advance OS'es like Linux) but also with the large amount of research he has done and the books he has written. All of this, just for ungrateful little AC rats like you.
While people like you sit and demand free stuff, and whine about other people's free stuff, other people are actually out there doing research and coding, 'advancing free UNIXes'.
"Isn't it pretty much long dead as a platform? Anybody actually use minix out there"
As Tanenbaum has repeatedly said (and you can confirm if you go read his website) he explicitly wants MINIX to be used as an instructional aid in OS design, that students could learn their way around easily in a single-semester OS course
This makes a lot of sense to me. MINIX would no longer server it's purpose as a teaching aid if somebody tried to turn it into a viable platform. Sure, you can fork it if you want (at heart, that is why we now have Linux) but the original MINIX should stay what it is. There is definitely a need for something like this, which MINIX fills.
I have no idea what it means for MINIX now that it is BSD (compared to before), considering AST's intentions; but I suspect it may have to do with peoples' freedom to redistribute the OS (as opposed to having to get it from AST's website) - I very vaguely remember reading something like that on AST's website years ago - but it was pretty long ago, so I may be wrong.
The point is, AST most certainly isn't trying to suddenly play catch-up to Linux (some sort of 'too little too late thing) - many other posters here seem to think he is.
Does it really matter anymore if newer Linux distros no longer run well on old 386's?
For me, it does. I have a 386sx laptop with 2 MB RAM and a 40 MB HD and have been desperately looking for a free (as in speech) OS for it. FreeDOS turned out to be too slow, Linux too big, and V2OS isn't there yet. And Minix gives me small versions of all the Unix tools I need. This made my day.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Why don't you pour a bowl of hot minix down your I/O channels instead? :-)
I downloaded the Minix sources and poked through them to see if I could find anything interesting or useful. One thing I'd have been particularly interested to see would have been the sources to the compiler. The world does not yet contain enough 8086-target compilers, for those maniacs who still don't think the range of available boot loaders is good enough.
I didn't find them. Anywhere. I found the compiler driver, the thing that invokes the various compiler passes in turn, but nothing else.
If they're intentionally not present, I'd have expected to see something in the FAQ or info pages saying so and saying why. Anyone know where they went?
(And I tried to compile Advent on the nearest Unix box. It seemed to work, but as soon as I typed "GET LAMP" it segfaulted. Arrgh! :-)
It funny. Just last Friday I was thinking I should look at MINIX for a project I was thinking about. I needed a half a dozen or so computers, but they didn't need to be particularly powerful or fast. x86 compatibility was going to be helpful, (reduce hardware design by using ISA for off the shelf things)
A '386 would be overkill, but I've seen single board 8086/8088s in the price range that I was looking for. But using an 8088 would have put Linux out of the running for a potential OS. And then I thought of MINIX. It seemed to fit perfectly to what I needed, so this announcement is something I'm really happy to hear.
They wouldn't be using your work, they'd be using Tanenbaum's work. And he seems to be OK with it.
Any licence, commercial, free, or whatever, pretty much boils down to If you give me {something}, you can use my code. If you are willing to give up what they want, fine. If you aren't willing to give up what the owner wants, don't complain, just turn them down and don't use it.
Maybe things are different in Germany, but over here in the US, you can get as many 486's as you want for free. They typically have from 8 to 32M of RAM and have hard drives from 120-540M. Sometimes you even do a little better than that. I got a Pentium 60 for free not that long ago.
The point being, that if hardware good enough to run Linux is available for free or nearly so, why run Minix instead of Linux? If a 386SX with 2M of RAM and a 40M hard drive makes your day, wouldn't a 486DX2-66 with 24M, a 540M HD, a 3x SCSI CD-ROM drive and a 14" SVGA monitor (an example of an actual machine I got for free the other day -- all I had to do was add a keyboard and mouse) make it a lot better?
You've still missed the point. Minix isn't released with the advertising clause. That, my dear sir, is the point.
Feh!
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Sorry, but what is the point of your .sig?
It announces one of my copylefted games, namely Hampsterdeath for DOS, Windows, and Linux.
I'd go there, but it's down.
Typical for my college's ISP :-) Seriously, it was a critical hardware failure; they got it fixed about six hours after you posted.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Ok, ok, it's a bad pun.
Freudian slip.
Tongue twister twisted into tounge.