Background: for those who are unaware of Andrew Tanenbaum:
which begins:
" Andrew Stuart "Andy" Tanenbaum is a professor of computer science " at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is " best known as the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating " system for teaching purposes, and for his computer science " textbooks, regarded as standard texts in the field. He regards " his teaching job as his most important work.
An interview several days ago with Andrew Tanenbaum can be read here in English:
Several interesting passages in the interview caught my eye:
" The reason MINIX 3 didn't dominate the world has to do with one mistake " I made about 1992. At that time I thought BSD was going to take over " the world. It was a mature and stable system. I didn't see any point in " competing with it, so I focused MINIX on education. Four of the BSD " guys had just formed a company to sell BSD commercially. They even had " a nice phone number: 1-800-ITS-UNIX. That phone number did them and me " in. AT&T sued them over the phone number and the lawsuit took 3 years " to settle. That was precisely the period Linux was launched and BSD was " frozen due to the lawsuit. By the time it was settled, Linux had taken " off. My mistake was not to realize the lawsuit would take so long and " cripple BSD. If AT&T had not brought suit (or better yet, bought BSDI), " Linux would never have become popular at all and BSD would dominate the " world. " " Now as we are starting to go commercial, we are realizing the value of " the BSD license. Many companies refuse to make major investments in " modifying Linux to suit their needs if they have to give the code to " their competitors. We think that the BSD license alone will be a great " help to us, as well as the small size, reliability, and modularity.
and
" No, Linux "succeeded" because BSD was frozen out of the market by AT&T " at a crucial time. That's just dumb luck. Also, success is relative. I " run a political website that ordinary people read. On that site " statistics show that about 5% is Linux, 30% is Macintosh (which is BSD " inside) and the rest is Windows. These are ordinary people, not " computer geeks. I don't think of 5% as that big a success story.
and especially this little gem:
" Also noteworthy is that Google and others are putting a huge effort to " remove much of the code from the Linux kernel and replace it with BSD " code in userland, both to make it simpler and get rid of the GPL.
***** Moderator's Note *****I once worked for a company that is "well known" in the SCADA space, and soon realized that they were rebranding Linux to sell to the various utilities that deliver power and water, etc.
They weren't the first: Red Hat showned the world (as did Bill Gates) that the average corporate IT purchasing manager is a drooling idiot. Red Hat drove the first (pun intended) hurd of cattle up main street, by rebranding Linux and adding "license" fees for products that didn't require a license. Now those who were "present at the creation" of Linux are trying to explain away the Open-Source paradigm as an accident that "those in the know" will soon recover from.
Thus always the path of the revolution: it seems that some animals _are_ more equal than others.
Bill Horne Moderator