This "Linus" guy won't go anywhere. No one wants a half-done kernel that is just a hobby.

Plus the future is microkernels anyway, and there's strong competition between Minix and HURD

It kind of blew my mind when I learned an evolution of Minix ended up in every Intel computer anyway. You don't even get a choice.

Professor Tanenbaum strikes back...

Not only do you not get a choice, it benefits no one but Intel & the three letter agencies they are in bed with. Tanenbaum himself has expressed regret for the way it ended up being used:

"Many people (including me) don't like the idea of an all-powerful management engine in there at all (since it is a possible security hole and a dangerous idea in the first place), but that is Intel's business decision..."

I do recall him snarkily remarking that MINIX was thus "used on more PC's than Linux (or Windows!)"

30 years on and he was still upset I suppose

He could have avoided the choice Intel had by not using MIT license.

Isn't it BSD [1]? Anyway it became BSD only in 2000. It was $69 before that year. Of course everybody started using Linux because it cost zero. Linux didn't end into Intel's CPUs probably because its GPL.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix

You're right, I said that from memory and mixed up BSD license with MIT license. The point still stands though.

And because of the license he chose, they didn't even notify him of the fact. Resulting in this open letter.

https://cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

I came across this analysis of that incident: https://lukesmith.xyz/articles/why-i-use-the-gpl-and-not-cuc...

I'm not sure how I feel about it yet.

I skimmed the article which I don't hold in high regard for its word choice.

I think license choices will bite people, because they have to be made in advance, but nobody's certain of the future. Maybe my thing would not have been popular anyways, but it have been useful for some, so it wasn't a great idea to make it proprietary. Maybe my thing turns out to be beyond useful, so many profit from it, and I still live a modest life while fixing its bugs. The BSD wasn't a great choice then.

So I think, with license choice, a big thing is regret. And each license is also a political statement, especially the case with GPL I feel, with its strong ties to the ideologically driven FSF. These people want to build a world on those foundations, so they think that if people take but also give back, that'll be sustainable.

At the end of the day, Tanenbaum was both fooled and he wasn't. I absolutely empathize with him as a human. But he explicitly allowed for this kind of incident with his license choice.