On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 02:46:39PM +1100, terryc wrote: > On Thu, 20 Jan 2022 13:25:50 -0500 > Hendrik Boom <hend...@topoi.pooq.com> 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 _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
