Re: vieux troll barbu

Ce n'est pas tout à fait exact : le code source de Minix était fourni avec le livre sur les systèmes d'exploitation de Tanenbaum et seule une exploitation commerciale posait problème, au début.

Je cite Tanenbaum source :

While this was not free software in the sense of "free beer" it was free software in the sense of "free speech" since all the source code was available for only slightly more than the manufacturing cost. But even "free speech" is not completely "free"--think about slander, yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, etc. Also Remember (if you are old enough) that by 1987, a university educational license for UNIX cost 300,ドル a commercial license for a university cost 28,000,ドル and a commercial license for a company cost a lot more. For the first time, MINIX brought the cost of "UNIX-like" source code down to something a student could afford. Prentice Hall wasn't really interested in selling software. They were interested in selling books, so there was a fairly liberal policy on copying MINIX, but if a company wanted to sell it to make big bucks, PH wanted a royalty. Hence the PH lawyers equipped MINIX with a lot of boilerplate, but there was never any intention of really enforcing this against universities or students. Using the Internet for distributing that much code was not feasible in 1987, even for people with a high-speed (i.e., 1200 bps) modem.

Donc payant au début, pas libre, mais on ne peut pas dire qu'il était difficile pour un particulier de récupérer le code source.

Et assez rapidement, en plus :

When distribution via the Internet became feasible, I convinced Prentice Hall to drop its (extremely modest) commercial ambitions and they gave me permission to put the source on my website for free downloading, where it still is.