[TUHS] SunOS vs Linux

[arno.griffioen@ieee.org (Arno Griffioen)]

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.