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I was one of those students saving up the large sum for the book, when Linux was announced. There were other tensions at the time - the biggest was that Minix on 8086 was 16 bit real mode only. Someone had developed patches to run in 32 bit protected mode, but they were invasive and large, and the Minix maintainers would not integrate them as the increased complexity would not help the mission of Minix being easy to learn and tinker with. The filesystem code was also single threaded, essentially doing one request at a time. IIRC there were patches to address that too, also not integrated for the same reason. (Note that the books included print outs of the source so keeping it short did matter.)

This explains the final 2 sentences of the original Linux announcement:

> PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.

The book publisher is blamed for preventing Minix from being freely distributed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix#Licensing

Terrible mistakes. People keep repeating these mistakes. Makes me think of Larry McVoy.

Tanenbaum made that deal. He collected royalties from the book (as was his right) but it clearly was a way to make money for him. Just another part of the textbook grift because students were forced to work on Minix long after that that made any sense at all.

Ironically, that single threaded nature of the FS made it a perfect match for my own little OS and I happily hacked it to pieces to bootstrap it using message passing into a FS executable. That trick probably saved me a year in bringing up the kernel to the point that the OS could compile itself, which greatly sped up development.

> students were forced to work on Minix long after that that made any sense at all

Not to defend the textbook grift or the lack of vision here, but I strongly suspect an undergraduate minix course taught at VU would be very good. It’s not obvious to me that it would be inferior to the xv6-based course taught at MIT, for example.

That's fair, but it would be no less effective than a similar course based on Linux which would actually give the graduate a far more practical amount of knowledge. Acquisition of knowledge isn't free and to purposefully use a toy when the real thing is freely available for commercial reasons is just grift and AT and VU were well aware of this.

Note that all I'm doing here is taking AT at his word that he developed Minix solely because the source to Unix wasn't free to universities to hack on. They could have adopted Linux from the day that it became available then, or at least the beginning of the next academic year.

I believe in the present day, the premise motivating these undergrad books and courses based on alternatives (VU and Minix, MIT and xv6, Purdue and Xinu, God knows what else) is that Linux has become too complicated for an introductory course. I honestly don’t have any instinct as to whether this is correct pedagogically. I suspect the two main factors are how well the software facilitates getting students situated and in a position to do meaningful programming assignments quickly, and how motivated the students are to work on the software.

I reminder taking a security-oriented class ages ago and hacking on an operating system that was already dead as a trilobite, and we were all smart enough to realize this was not a triumph we’d be bragging about to our future children (or recruiters). Bleh.

> Linux has become too complicated for an introductory course.

So that already suggests a fantastic way to make some progress.

I think Tanenbaum had a unique vision at the time, but he went about it in the most ham handed manner possible and if not for VU Minix wouldn't even be remembered today. Linus had a huge advantage: he didn't have a lifestyle to support just yet.

Re your last paragraphs: I think RMS really meant just the Linux kernel when he wrote that(the topic is drivers, after all), not GNU/Linux, the OS or GNU/Linux, "the system". So it can be argued that he isn't really contradicting himself

Agreed. As a practical example, Alpine Linux isn't a GNU/Linux OS, but it does use Linux+Xorg graphics drivers.

Selling ACK meant money for research into distributed systems (Amoeba) and parallel programming languages. I can see that money for research is more attractive than open source.

For MINIX the situation was different and I think more unfortunate. AST wanted to make sure that everybody could obtain MINIX and made his publisher agree to distributing the MINIX sources and binaries on floppies. Not something the publisher really wanted, they want to sell AST's book. In return the publisher got (as is usual for books) the exclusive right to distribute MINIX.

Right at the start that was fine, but when Usenet and the Internet took off, that became quite painful. People trying to maintain and distribute patch sets.

I disagreed strongly with that at the time and still do. The money we're talking about here was a pittance compared to the money already contributed by Dutch society to the university where these people were working. Besides that some of these royalty streams went into private pockets.

A friend of mine was studying under Andy and I had a chat with him about this at his Amstelveen residence prior to the release. He was dead set on doing it that way. As a non-student and relatively poor programmer I pointed out to him that his chosen strategy would make Minix effectively unaffordable to me in spite of his stated goal of 'unlocking unix'. So I ended up in Torvald's camp when he released Linux as FOSS (I never contributed to either, but I figured as a user I should pick the one that would win the race, even if from a tech perspective I agreed more with Tanenbaum than with Torvalds).

Minix was (is?) flogged to students of VU for much longer than was beneficial to those students, all that time and effort (many 100's of man years by now) could have gone into structurally improving Linux. But that would have required admitting a mistake.

Universities get paid for teaching and research. Any software that is produced is a by product. Producing production quality software in a university is not easy and the university has to find a way to fund it.

MINIX was originally a private project of ast. It worked very well for the goal of teaching student the basics of operating systems.

One thing that might have been a waste of time is making the MINIX utilities POSIX compliant. Then again, many students would like an opportunity to work on something like that. The ones that wanted to work on Linux could just do that. Students worked in their free time on lots of interesting projects that were unrelated to the university.

> The ones that wanted to work on Linux could just do that.

Sure, but time is a very finite quantity and wasting a couple of years on Tanenbaum's pet project may have resulted in some residual knowledge about how operating systems in general worked but looking at most of the developments they pursued the bulk were such dead-ends that even outside of VU there was relatively little adoption. The world had moved to Linux and VU refused to move with it.

From being ahead they ended up being behind.

I wonder who you are thinking of who 'wasted a couple of years'. Regular students do one course in operating systems. That is a series of lectures and some practical work. The practical work is a couple of weeks at most if you know what you are doing.

Some people spent a lot more time on MINIX, but that was either as a hobby or the PhD students who worked on MINIX3. But MINIX3 generated lots of papers with a best paper award, so that can hardly be seen as wasted from an academic point of view.

I have some friends that went that route. They did not come away with anything that helped their careers later on and the 'academic point of view' in CS in NL hasn't been the best way to put food on your table since the days of Dijkstra.

> I love it how RMS has both these quotes in the same text: > > "Please don't fall into the practice of calling the whole system “Linux,” since that means attributing our work to someone else. Please give us equal mention." > > "This makes it difficult to write free drivers so that Linux and XFree86 can support new hardware." > > And there are only a few lines between those quotes.

I'll be honest, I don't understand your point here?

RMS calls it Linux, not GNU/Linux in the second quote.

He means Linux the kernel, getting new drivers.

Another interesting fact is that until Linux came to be, GCC only became relevant because Sun started the trend among UNIX vendors to split UNIX into user and developer SKUs, thus making the whole development tooling behind an additional license.

the Free University Compiler Kit, also known as VUCK. (The Dutch word for “free” is written with a v.)

I'm not sure if I'm reading satire or they are having some fun trolling.

The adjective meaning "free" is "vrij" or "vrije" in Dutch.

Amusingly, the Dutch verb "vrijen" does, in fact, mean to have sex.

You really just made an account now to make that point?

his comment was more useful than yours

He made an account name called vrijen which is having sex in dutch.. as he himself explained. Not sure if you noticed that part

I like the Afrikaans (evolved from Dutch) even better for its streamlined spelling and double-use depending on context:

Vry == "free" (noun) or "to court/kiss/have sex" (verb, contextual).

Of course RMS understood the overtone perfectly, but Vrije Universiteit (vu.nl) is the real name of the university. Its name can be translated to "liberated university". As I understand it, it's a free university in the sense that historically, students of all religions were eligible to attend, as opposed to e.g. Katholieke Universiteit which was Catholic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrije_Universiteit_Amsterdam

Sounds like Katholieke Universiteit ought to release their own Compiler Kit ;)

Catholic University Compiler Kit? It would have to use one of the eponymous licenses if it didn't want to cause a paradox, heh.

https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...

The librarated part means free from government control. Until the VU all Dutch universities belonged (indirectly) to the Dutch government.

Some universities, especially in Latin America, use the term "autonomous". Is that the same thing is "free" in this context?

Yes. Absence of direct control by the government. The VU was founded for religious reasons, so the main goal was to be able to teach theology according to the particular type of protestant Christianity that the founders of the VU believed in.

I think the part that he - and you - missed is that tuition at the time was entirely free, so it wasn't just 'free' in one sense of the word.

Vrije as in "Not Catholic", not as in beer.

But it’s correct. :)

Linux the kernel has the drivers.