Minix Gets a NetBSD Code Infusion
Minix 3.2, released Wednesday , has many new Unix commands and libraries ported from NetBSD, another open-source Unix operating system. The update is part of an ongoing effort to modernize the OS, and make it usable beyond its original mission as a teaching aid.
Andrew Tanenbaum, a computer science professor at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, created Minix as a low-cost implementation of Unix that students could use and study. The source code, along with a CD of the OS, accompanied his seminal 1987 textbook "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation."
Due to the licensing restrictions of the book, however, Minix was not freely available for general use, which prompted then-University of Helsinki student Torvalds to create his own open-source Unix OS, which was named Linux. Torvalds also objected to some of Tanenbaum's design decisions, most notably the use of a componentized microarchitecture , rather than a single monolithic one, the model Torvalds used for Linux. Minix was subsequently relicensed as open source in 2000.
