<story><title>Minix 3.3.0</title><url>http://www.minix3.org/330.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve upvoted this because I would like to see minix succeed and for nostalgic reasons but I can&amp;#x27;t help the feeling that minix has missed its window of opportunity. In practically every arena where minix could have established itself there are now formidable entities entrenched with mindshare, budgets and an installed base that minix can&amp;#x27;t even begin to touch. I&amp;#x27;ve got similar feelings towards plan 9.&lt;p&gt;Even so, minix has a spot, and that spot is in education, an OS that can function like a digital version of a petri dish, something that you can quickly morph to test out a new idea without having to drag a huge behemoth of a kernel behind you.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m quite sad about this, I think that if minix had been open instead of &amp;#x27;published as a book&amp;#x27; that minix would have been what Linux is today only better engineered and that we&amp;#x27;d all be better off for that.&lt;p&gt;Not being GPL&amp;#x27;d meant that a whole generation of hackers followed Linus Torvalds rather than buying a bunch of books from Prentice Hall. And so now we have 70&amp;#x27;s era tech instead of 90&amp;#x27;s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Sanddancer</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love to wipe the dust off a bunch of the old research OSes from the 90s. Amoeba, which gave birth to Python, is another OS from Tanenbaum that I feel died much too soon of a death due to the goliath that Linux became. There are so many tantalizing bits and pieces about the network transparency so many of those research OSes offered that have shamefully been left by the wayside.&lt;p&gt;With distribution through a book, at the time, it wasn&amp;#x27;t a terrible idea. The internet was in its infancy, and there were a lot of schools that had real poor connectivity. Unfortunately, the internet grew rapidly, and textbook publishers are conservative, and the rest really is history.&lt;p&gt;To be honest, I feel there is a near-depressing anti-intellectualism in discussing non-Linux kernels with a number of hackers. They know the devil that is Linux, and fail to see how exploring those other devils and daemons out there could possibly improve their perceptions of what an OS can and should be. Network transparency, non-traditional filesystems, etc, have all been hampered by too stubborn of a refusal to question the assumptions as to what a kernel and OS can and should be.</text></comment>
<story><title>Minix 3.3.0</title><url>http://www.minix3.org/330.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jacquesm</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve upvoted this because I would like to see minix succeed and for nostalgic reasons but I can&amp;#x27;t help the feeling that minix has missed its window of opportunity. In practically every arena where minix could have established itself there are now formidable entities entrenched with mindshare, budgets and an installed base that minix can&amp;#x27;t even begin to touch. I&amp;#x27;ve got similar feelings towards plan 9.&lt;p&gt;Even so, minix has a spot, and that spot is in education, an OS that can function like a digital version of a petri dish, something that you can quickly morph to test out a new idea without having to drag a huge behemoth of a kernel behind you.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m quite sad about this, I think that if minix had been open instead of &amp;#x27;published as a book&amp;#x27; that minix would have been what Linux is today only better engineered and that we&amp;#x27;d all be better off for that.&lt;p&gt;Not being GPL&amp;#x27;d meant that a whole generation of hackers followed Linus Torvalds rather than buying a bunch of books from Prentice Hall. And so now we have 70&amp;#x27;s era tech instead of 90&amp;#x27;s.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>norswap</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m a firm believer (ok, a wannabe believer) that one day the &amp;quot;whole goddamn corrupt temple&amp;quot; will collapse under the weight of its own complexity; and then we will go back to simpler, cleaner fundamentals. Maybe that will be the time of Minix. But maybe not, maybe it&amp;#x27;ll be the time of Mirage OS instead.&lt;p&gt;I really wonder what the overlap between Minix and Mirage are btw. Could Minix be used like Mirage as a minimal application-specific OS?</text></comment>