OT: non-commercial open source license?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 12:44:14PM -0500, Colin McGregor wrote:
> 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.

Minix is now released under the BSD license.  But a bit late for that
now I guess. :)

> 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.

I thought Windows NT was supposed to be "microkernel" based, although
who knows if anyone kind find the kernel under all that other crap.  Mac
OS X runs on the mach microkernel, although I am not sure if they follow
the microkernel philosphy completely, or cheated to gain performance in
some places.  Certainly the use of objective C is very suited for a
message passing based system in general.

Len Sorensen
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