Re: M$ licenses Unix
On Tue, May 20, 2003 at 01:37:42PM -0500, Wathen, Metherion wrote:
> I read somewhere that Linux was/is based on Minix, where does
> that figure into all of this?
> I realize it may be a Unix variant but to what degree of
> separation?
Minix is an operating system created by Andrew Tanenbaum (Vrije
Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) to be used for educational
purposes (only). So, students at the VU can follow the course 'Operating
Systems, design and implementation' which follows Andy's book closely.
This book also contains the source of minix in full. Anyway, it was
written from scratch and the idea is that anyone can hack into it to see
how it works. I'm at a loss of what the actual license is, I'm afraid.
It ran on the 8088 processor (yes, really).
Many people then contacted Tanenbaum to request additional features and
some were included, but a _lot_ were left out. The idea was not to
create a free unix kernel, but to create a (free) unix kernel for
educational purposes only. One of these people was a Finnish student
who we all know by name and decided to create his own kernel. If I read
the paragraphs in Tanenbaum's book 'Modern Operating Systems' I get the
feeling that Tanenbaum might even have been relieved by the fact that
someone else was going to handle all the requests for improvements...
So, the way I understand it, Linus Torvalds will _never_ be sued by
Andrew Tanenbaum for including the ideas and structure (of the source
code) of minix into linux. There are also many differences between the
kernel structure of minix and linux and when linux began to evolve, it
already led a live of its own, for better or for worse...
> Should I be concerned that one day in the near future Linux
> will no longer exist as an operating system?
Depends on how you see it. I don't know what the hurd will do, but if I
understand the problems with the linux kernel correctly, I would say
that eventually (not the near future) linux will (must) be abandoned
because it basically has no internal structure. It is a monolithic
kernel, whereas various studies have shown that a microkernel is far
more secure and easier to debug and maintain and develop and ...
>From Tanenbaum's book 'Modern Operating Systems', pg. 56:
<quote>
Monolithic systems.
By far the most common organization, this aproach might well be
subtitled 'The Big Mess.' The structure is that there is no structure.
<\quote>
According to Tanenbaum, much research is done in microkernel design, of
which the Mach microkernel (the hurd is based on this) is only the first
generation...
IIRC, GNU will change to the hurd sometime in the future. This does not
matter for debian, of course, ;-)
David
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