> Ah, but he did. There were TONS of people begging Andy to make Minix > do virtual memory on 386 hardware and also to loosen up somewhat on the > licensing. He would do neither.
I wasn't paying attention to the public debate at the time and even managed not to notice the micro-kernel/monolythic-kernel controversy, but I have a pretty clear recollection that the licencing for Minix was dictated by McGraw-Hill, the publishers of the Minix book, rather than Tanenbaum himself. As for 386-hardware, I already mentioned that Bruce Evans had a legitimate minix-386 going, whether virtual memory was involved or not, I have no recollection. The licencing, I recall, was that you had to have paid for the source distribution and you were then entitled to all subsequent upgrades and so on. I did not get the impression that it was a show stopper at the time, I paid considerably more for Plan 9 with a much more restrictive licence. I had some very brief interactions with Andy (and Bruce) at the time, and both struck me as extremely pleasant, down to earth people. Torvalds never gave me the same warm feeling as they. ++L
