Comment #131

Comment #131

What? AST has ugly criticisms of Linux? Gee, I thought he and Linus were on good terms now since they buried the hatchet over that silly flame war back in 1992. Oh, wait! That was before AST got his commercialization grant. So now Linux is a competitive threat to Minix (and Tux is a sworn enemy of that silly raccoon)... Fine. Bring it on, Mr. Raccoon (or whatever your name is).

Minix's "success" (er, lack thereof) might have been all about licensing. If only AST has licensed Minix under the GPL way back in 1991, I could very well be typing this on a Minix box right now instead of a Linux box. Something to ponder...

P.S. If this has already been discussed above, then I'm sorry—please understand that it's way past my bedtime and I'm just a little un-motivated at the moment to scan 130 comments above. But I did feel the need to vent. And, besides, I fully acknowledge that posting comment #131 implies a seriously late arrival to this discussion party.

P.P.S. Actually licensing probably wouldn't have mattered one bit; Linus and AST would have likely still had their nasty debate, and Linux would see development like it did. If AST were really a good academician, then he'd at least acknowledge the commercial and engineering successes of monolithic kernels (not just Linux, but weren't early WinNT kernels monolithic?), instead of pushing his narrow-minded "microkernels are the only way" philosophy. Okay I'm done now. Really.