OT: non-commercial open source license?

[Colin McGregor]

--- Evan Leibovitch <evan-ieNeDk6JonTYtjvyW6yDsg at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Christopher Browne wrote:
> 
> >Linux would have been no more than a historical
> curiosity if Linus had
> >restricted its use to "personal only, no
> commercial."
> >  
> >
> This is indeed the fate of Minix, the pet project of
> an operating 
> systems professor where Linus went to school.

No. Minix was created by Andrew Tanenbaum at Vrije
Universiteit in Amsterdam, while Linus Torvalds went
to school at University of Helsinki. Andrew
Tanenbaum's goal with Minix was something that he
could use to teach, so there were two considerations
for him, first he wasn't interested in creating a
general purpose OS, and second any licence conditions
had to take into account what the text book publisher
wanted. Both these considerations meant that Andrew
Tanenbaum couldn't/wouldn't do what Linus did do.

> It wasn't until April 2000 that Minix (whose history
> dates back to the 
> 60s) removed the "educational use only" restriction,
> but by that time 
> Linux was well established. Arguably had Andrew
> Tannenbaum not had that 
> restriction, and allowed Linus to build on the what
> existed rather than 
> re-invent a Unix-like OS under the GPL, things might
> be quite different 
> today.
> 
> Instead of being known as one of the co-creators of
> one of the world's 
> most popular operating systems or at least
> remembered for all the system 
> software research he did, Tannenbaum will likely be
> most remembered for 
> his 1992 "Linux is obsolete" flamewar provocation in
> the Minix Usenet 
> newsgroup.

Well, Andrew Tannenbaum is a passionate believer in
micro kernels, while Linus went with a monolithic
kernel. Micro kernels look great on paper, but have a
performance hit that Linus wasn't willing to accept.
In the years to come who knows, maybe the the micro
kernels will win out over the monolithic kernels in
the way over 10s of millions of years mammals won over
reptiles. But for now at least the monolithic kernels
reign supreme over the landscape.


--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml