MINIX author Andy Tanenbaum says “MINIX is much smaller than Linux and might well be suitable as the operating system for a watch, camera, or transistor radio.” MINIX source code has just been released under terms equivalent to the “BSD license”, according to a letter posted by Tanenbaum at Deja.com . . .

“Better late than never. I finally got permission from Prentice Hall to change the MINIX license to the BSD license. The lawyers sort of sat on this for two years.”

“Anyway, the new license conditions are below. These are the same as for Berkeley UNIX. It seems to me better for the users than GPL since there is no requirement to provide source code. MINIX is much smaller than Linux and might well be suitable as the operating system for a watch, camera, or transistor radio. The manufacturer of, say, a watch might really not want to provide a CD-ROM with the source code with each watch or even a website with the source code, as being too much trouble. The new MINIX license says you can distribute source if you want to, but you don't have to. At this point, for most intents and purposes, MINIX is effectively no different than being in the public domain. You can do whatever you want with it.”

“Sorry for the long delay. I had hoped this would happen earlier.”

“As I mentioned before, there might well be an interesting future for MINIX on very low-end embedded devices where tiny size is important. What is also important is that MINIX is fairly modular. If you don't need the file system, just remove it.”

About MINIX

Minix is a small operating system that is very similar to UNIX. A small UNIX clone developed for educational purposes. It has been written from scratch, and therefore does not contain any AT&T code — not in the kernel, the compiler, the utilities, or the libraries. For this reason it can be made available with complete source code. Minix was originally developed by Andrew Tanenbaum as a tool for teaching operating systems principles. The current version of Minix is described in detail in the text Operating Systems: Design and Implementation, 2nd edition, written by Tanenbaum and Albert Woodhull.

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.