Rick Troth wrote:
> The story goes that Andrew Tannenbaum (Comp Sci professor and
> creator of MINIX, which few can dispute was an inspiration for Linux)
> criticized Linux as "out of date", being monolithic.
The subject line of the Usenet message on comp.os.minix in which he
responded to the appearance of Linux read "LINUX is obsolete".
Obviously a balanced and moderate observation, which has
meanwhile been confirmed by history. ;-)
> The Linux crowd,
> of course, was so delighted to have a kernel that WORKED and that was
> UNCONSTRAINED (MINIX is not GPL)
Actually, GPL wasn't the issue.
The issue was that MINIX had a license that, although fairly open
and permissive for its time, did not allow redistribution, so
management of the various third-party changes that Andy wouldn't
integrate into the main product because they didn't help the primary
function that he developed MINIX for (teaching) became a royal pain,
with all sorts of patch sets that one needed to apply to the base
source that one bought from Prentice Hall.
Some years ago, Andy finally managed to get P-H to re-license the
whole thing under a plain, simple BSD style license. Had he done
that ten years earlier, things might have gone different.
> that they did not let this deter them.
> (HURD was unheard of and Mach remains mockingly daunting.)
Actually, HURD was not unheard of, it just had been in the
"mythical" state form some years, and Linus made explicit
reference to its development status in the discussion (I think
he even mentioned that the MACH microkernel alone, not counting
the HURD or BSD Unix servers, is already way larger than the
entire ("large", "monolithic") Linux kernel was at the time...).
The discussion between Andy and Linus is famous and has been
retained in the archives. Andy felt very strongly about
the micro-kernel approach, and Linus felt very strongly that
that might be a theoretically nicer design, but with existing
technology not practically feasible (yet).
--
Willem Konynenberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Konynenberg Software Engineering
