On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 02:46:39PM +1100, terryc wrote:
> On Thu, 20 Jan 2022 13:25:50 -0500
> Hendrik Boom <hendrik@???> wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Jan 20, 2022 at 06:40:13PM +0100, Antony Stone wrote:
> > > On Thursday 20 January 2022 at 17:24:46, Peter Duffy wrote:
> > >
> > > > On Sun, 2022-01-16 at 04:12 -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> > > > > Hi all,
> > > > >
> > > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECCr_KFl41E
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for the link to that - brilliant talk. I've always thought
> > > > that Brian Kernighan himself was the great communicator in the
> > > > UNIX group - I wonder whether "The C Programming Language" and
> > > > "The Unix Programming Environment" would have happened without
> > > > his obvious ability to take abstruse and difficult material and
> > > > make it accessible.
> > > >
> > > > If I had one incredibly tiny nit to pick, it would be that he
> > > > didn't mention GNU (it appeared once in the slide showing Linus'
> > > > original email). Without GNU, it's reasonable to suppose that
> > > > linux wouldn't have happened.
> > >
> > > I disagree with "it's reasonable to suppose that".
> > >
> > > Linus Torvalds was building a system for himself, partly (I
> > > believe) because he liked Unix but couldn't afford a Unix system of
> > > his own, and therefore he was of course going to build it using as
> > > much free (of charge) software as he could.
> > >
> > > That meant GNU.
> > >
> > > I think the Unix philosophy and design principles are beautiful,
> > > and formed the basis of an amazingly efficient system, but some of
> > > those principles are embodied in Linux and some are embodied in GNU
> > > (for example, devices as files, and pipes, in the first; and tools
> > > such as tr, cut, grep in the second), so these days we can't really
> > > separate the two - Linux is nothing without GNU (although the
> > > reverse is not true).
> >
> > And don't forget Minix, the system he used while developing his
> > kernel.
>
> Didn't Linus start what became Linux because Minix was only 286 capable
> and was not going to be upgraded and Linux wanted something that
> would run on 386 cpus.
>
> I think there was also a licensing issue involved in modifying Minix.

As far as I know, minix came from Andrew Tannenbaum at the Free University
of Amsterdam.and maybe also from the students in an OS course.

I don't know the details, but it was at one point sold commercially, although its main purpose was for teaching.

Whatever the licence then, it seems to have ended up with a sufficiently
free licence for Intel to put a copy of it in the management engine in
their CPUs for the last decade or so *without informing Tannenbaum*.
Tannenbaum was miffed; he said the licence allowed this, but he would
have liked to have been informed.

-- hendrik