[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux
Arno Griffioen
arno.griffioen at ieee.org
Mon Jan 9 16:32:25 AEST 2017
On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 02:00:22PM +1100, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote:
> > load it. Which is sort of funny because it was not particularly
> > secret between most BSD users.
>
> Given that the first person he mentions in the article is Bruce Evans,
> it's difficult to understand how he hadn't heard of it.
Have to keep in mind that Linus was at the time of course a student in
Finland, so outside the USA.
Outside the USA such BSD (or other *IX) source-code access on universities
and technical schools was not common is my personal experience.
At that time I was a student too and apart from MINIX there really was
little to no *IX source access available to anyone (BSD or otherwise) unless
for very specific research applications and needing to sign all sorts of NDA
stuff.
Buying a BSD license was way outside a student's budget at that time
and universities were not very forthcoming in giving them access.
As a result MINIX was actually making quite a few strides to get more
complex, but Andrew Tanenbaum always actively resisted turning it into a
'production' system as he wanted to retain it as an educational tool
(and the license agreement was quite limited to this purpose) pushing a
lot of european hackers towards this initially very rudimentary minix
userland-compatible new little kernel made by some finnish dude ;)
Quite a few strong discussions between Linus and Andrew at the time
on Usenet in comp.os.minix about the monolithic vs. microkernel
ideas.
Bye, Arno.
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