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Andrew Tanenbaum On Minix, Linux, BSD, and Licensing
An anonymous reader points out an interesting, detailed interview with Andrew Tanenbaum at Linuxfr.org; Tanenbaum holds forth on the current state of MINIX, licensing decisions, and the real reason he believes that Linux caught on just when he "thought BSD was going to take over the world." ("I think Linux succeeded against BSD, which was a stable mature system at the time simply because BSDI got stuck in a lawsuit and was effectively stopped for several years.")
I don't understand how one can say BSDI suit could do anything much for Linux. The suit did not preclude the creation of FreeBSD/NetBSD and thus Linux and BSD both had opportunity. If the claim is that BSDI lent some sort of credibility/support, during that time Linux had none of that either (Red Hat didn't even technically have an offering until 94, and I would say it wasn't worth taking seriously until '97 or so).
Whatever went 'right' for Linux and 'wrong' for BSD had nothing to do with that suit.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Yes, for only $995 at least in early '94. Complete non-starter. Its like asking why IBM zOS isn't taking over the world of computing today...
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
When you came to BSD in 1996 you were five years late to the party, since 386BSD came out in 1991, and didn't support FDISK labels, preventing users from dual-booting. Indeed, early versions of FreeBSD and NetBSD, both of which grew from 386BSD, shared this lack. Linux used fdisk from the start (Linus not seeing a need for eight confusingly-identified partitions) which permitted dual-booting if you had partition slots free.
So you're being elitist, but ironically, not elitist enough to know what you are talking about.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The question is not why Linux succeeded, but why Minix failed.
The answer is simple, Tanenbaum refused to develop a 386 version,
claiming bizarrely that there were so many 286's in the world
that people would always use them.
If he had brought out a 386 version of Minix
I doubt if Linux would have taken off.
My impression at the time was that he got bored with Minix,
and wanted to move on to other things.
But the way in which Minix has been written out of the Linux story
is very strange, in my opinion.
In its origins, Linux was simply a fork of Minix.
Admittedly Torvalds had to re-write everything,
but that was just because Tanenbaum had a veto
on Minix development, and only allowed a tiny handful
of devotees to add code.
Torvalds was infinitely better at getting a team
to co-operate with him.
That was the secret of his success.
Because Tanenbaum has hated Linus and Linux for twenty years. He and his supporters started no small number of flamewars in their day with all sorts of obnoxious claims, especially after Linus poo-pooed on the idea of microkernels.
But it's all pretty irrelevant now. The fact remains that guys like me picked up Linux in those early years in no small part because everyone looked on Minix as a toy and BSD didn't have the hardware support to allow it to run on almost all 386 and 486 machines you could pick up, from IBMs to home-built jobs. Not only that, but when hardware came out that was problematic, there were guys out there who would literally write up a device driver in a few days or weeks. There was, and still is, very much a "make it work" attitude out there.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Except this isn't true of microkernel systems like Minix. And this is the point: microkernels enforce protection boundaries between components so failure and recovery become feasible. That simply isn't possible in a monolithic kernel without resorting to proof-carrying code of some sort.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
In its origins, Linux was simply a fork of Minix.
Oh come on. How many people still believe this Ken Brown nonsense? Even Tanenbaum himself said this is complete nonsense.
"If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
Read the current article, then the one linked to another interview with Linus. It will become clear.
To the best of my knowledge, the ath5k/madwifi drivers are the only Linux drivers to be ported from the BSDs (OpenBSD/FreeBSD) to Linux. Which other drivers out of the 56 Linux wifi drivers were ported from the BSDs to qualify the "large number of WiFi drivers were written for FreeBSD or OpenBSD and then ported to Linux" statement?
Linux has had its own 802.11 stack called mac802.11 since the 2.6.22 kernel four years ago which was developed by Devicescape. The only driver I know of that carried a (Net)BSD 802.11 stack over to Linux was madwifi which had net802.11, was never mainline and was superseded by ath5k... The madwifi driver never went mainline, nor did its net802.11 stack. Why do you think that the 802.11 stack from a BSD needs copying into a Linux driver when mac802.11 exists?
In 1992, the ability to put Linux on its own partitiion and have it coexist with DOS on a single physical drive was the *ENTIRE* reason why I originally decided to go with Linux instead of 386BSD, which was also freely available at the time, even though BSD offered considerably more functionality than Linux during that period.
It had absolutely squat to do with lawsuits.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I can say, with some authority, that Linux succeeded on it's own merit, mostly because it supported a broad range of commodity hardware. It got a boost because everyone started buying 386s, which were the first competent hardware for the IBM PC. There were lots of options back in the late eighties, all vying for some kind of position, but most of them had big problems of community: Coherent, MINIX, xinu, Xenix, Apple A/UX, netBSD, OS/2, OS-9, QNX, Lynx, etc. I looked at all of them as reasonable alternatives to the laughable PC operating systems of the day (MS-DOS and Macintosh System 7). NetBSD was a reasonable competitor right up through the mid-nineties, but Linux hardware support eventually blew it out of the water. By 1995 it was clear that Linux and the open source development methodology had won handily.
Yes, licensing had something to do with all of this, but so did Linus' management style: people wanted to work on Linux, and Linus did not turn them away: he welcomed them. I wouldn't want to say anything bad about Dr. Tanenbaum, I have the greatest respect for him and his work, but other than netBSD, none of the other free and open OSs of the day were making any attempt to take the general market, MINIX included. I remember looking at MINIX and rejecting it because of it's limitation to academic use (the limitation to the 286 wasn't that much of a concern, though it probably should have been).
just a ghost in the machine.