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Comment by phicoh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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