On 21-01-2022 21:26, Hendrik Boom wrote:
On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 02:46:39PM +1100, terryc wrote:
On Thu, 20 Jan 2022 13:25:50 -0500
Hendrik Boom <hend...@topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 06:40:13PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
On Thursday 20 January 2022 at 17:24:46, Peter Duffy wrote:
On Sun, 2022-01-16 at 04:12 -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
Hi all,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E
Thanks for the link to that - brilliant talk. I've always thought
that Brian Kernighan himself was the great communicator in the
UNIX group - I wonder whether "The C Programming Language" and
"The Unix Programming Environment" would have happened without
his obvious ability to take abstruse and difficult material and
make it accessible.
If I had one incredibly tiny nit to pick, it would be that he
didn't mention GNU (it appeared once in the slide showing Linus'
original email). Without GNU, it's reasonable to suppose that
linux wouldn't have happened.
I disagree with "it's reasonable to suppose that".
Linus Torvalds was building a system for himself, partly (I
believe) because he liked Unix but couldn't afford a Unix system of
his own, and therefore he was of course going to build it using as
much free (of charge) software as he could.
That meant GNU.
I think the Unix philosophy and design principles are beautiful,
and formed the basis of an amazingly efficient system, but some of
those principles are embodied in Linux and some are embodied in GNU
(for example, devices as files, and pipes, in the first; and tools
such as tr, cut, grep in the second), so these days we can't really
separate the two - Linux is nothing without GNU (although the
reverse is not true).
And don't forget Minix, the system he used while developing his
kernel.
Didn't Linus start what became Linux because Minix was only 286 capable
and was not going to be upgraded and Linux wanted something that
would run on 386 cpus.
I think there was also a licensing issue involved in modifying Minix.
As far as I know, minix came from Andrew Tannenbaum at the Free University
of Amsterdam.and maybe also from the students in an OS course.
I don't know the details, but it was at one point sold commercially, although
its main purpose was for teaching.
Whatever the licence then, it seems to have ended up with a sufficiently
free licence for Intel to put a copy of it in the management engine in
their CPUs for the last decade or so *without informing Tannenbaum*.
Tannenbaum was miffed; he said the licence allowed this, but he would
have liked to have been informed.
-- hendrik
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I still do have the book and floppy disk from the 1.0 version somewhere
in storage. At the time it had a restrictive license and I had Sun and
HP systems to play with at work so I have not done much with Minix .
Later on I moved to Linux and forgot about Minix until I learned that
Intel implemented Minix in their processors ME which was a big surprise
(Indeed even for Tannenbaum!).
Grtz.
Nick
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