The relevant bit:<p>" Shortly before beginning the GNU Project, I heard about the Free University Compiler Kit, also known as VUCK. (The Dutch word for “free” is written with a v.) This was a compiler designed to handle multiple languages, including C and Pascal, and to support multiple target machines. I wrote to its author asking if GNU could use it.<p>He responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not. I therefore decided that my first program for the GNU Project would be a multilanguage, multiplatform compiler."<p>And not only was the university 'free' and the compiler not, neither was 'Minix', which was put out there through Prentice Hall in a series of books that you had to pay a fairly ridiculous amount of money for if you were a student there.<p>So the VU had the two main components of the free software world in their hand and botched them both because of simple greed.<p>I love it how RMS has both these quotes in the same text:<p>"Please don't fall into the practice of calling the whole system “Linux,” since that means attributing our work to someone else. Please give us equal mention."<p>"This makes it difficult to write free drivers so that Linux and XFree86 can support new hardware."<p>And there are only a few lines between those quotes.
I was one of those students saving up the large sum for the book, when Linux was announced. There were other tensions at the time - the biggest was that Minix on 8086 was 16 bit real mode only. Someone had developed patches to run in 32 bit protected mode, but they were invasive and large, and the Minix maintainers would not integrate them as the increased complexity would not help the mission of Minix being easy to learn and tinker with. The filesystem code was also single threaded, essentially doing one request at a time. IIRC there were patches to address that too, also not integrated for the same reason. (Note that the books included print outs of the source so keeping it short did matter.)<p>This explains the final 2 sentences of the original Linux announcement:<p>> PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.<p>The book publisher is blamed for preventing Minix from being freely distributed: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix#Licensing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix#Licensing</a>
Tanenbaum made that deal. He collected royalties from the book (as was his right) but it clearly was a way to make money for him. Just another part of the textbook grift because students were forced to work on Minix long after that that made any sense at all.<p>Ironically, that single threaded nature of the FS made it a perfect match for my own little OS and I happily hacked it to pieces to bootstrap it using message passing into a FS executable. That trick probably saved me a year in bringing up the kernel to the point that the OS could compile itself, which greatly sped up development.
Terrible mistakes. People keep repeating these mistakes. Makes me think of Larry McVoy.
Re your last paragraphs: I think RMS really meant just the Linux kernel when he wrote that(the topic is drivers, after all), not GNU/Linux, the OS or GNU/Linux, "the system". So it can be argued that he isn't really contradicting himself
Selling ACK meant money for research into distributed systems (Amoeba) and parallel programming languages. I can see that money for research is more attractive than open source.<p>For MINIX the situation was different and I think more unfortunate. AST wanted to make sure that everybody could obtain MINIX and made his publisher agree to distributing the MINIX sources and binaries on floppies. Not something the publisher really wanted, they want to sell AST's book. In return the publisher got (as is usual for books) the exclusive right to distribute MINIX.<p>Right at the start that was fine, but when Usenet and the Internet took off, that became quite painful. People trying to maintain and distribute patch sets.
I disagreed strongly with that at the time and still do. The money we're talking about here was a pittance compared to the money already contributed by Dutch society to the university where these people were working. Besides that some of these royalty streams went into private pockets.<p>A friend of mine was studying under Andy and I had a chat with him about this at his Amstelveen residence prior to the release. He was dead set on doing it that way. As a non-student and relatively poor programmer I pointed out to him that his chosen strategy would make Minix effectively unaffordable to me in spite of his stated goal of 'unlocking unix'. So I ended up in Torvald's camp when he released Linux as FOSS (I never contributed to either, but I figured as a user I should pick the one that would win the race, even if from a tech perspective I agreed more with Tanenbaum than with Torvalds).<p>Minix was (is?) flogged to students of VU for much longer than was beneficial to those students, all that time and effort (many 100's of man years by now) could have gone into structurally improving Linux. But that would have required admitting a mistake.
> I love it how RMS has both these quotes in the same text:
>
> "Please don't fall into the practice of calling the whole system “Linux,” since that means attributing our work to someone else. Please give us equal mention."
>
> "This makes it difficult to write free drivers so that Linux and XFree86 can support new hardware."
>
> And there are only a few lines between those quotes.<p>I'll be honest, I don't understand your point here?
But it’s correct. :)<p>Linux the kernel has the drivers.
<i>the Free University Compiler Kit, also known as VUCK. (The Dutch word for “free” is written with a v.)</i><p>I'm not sure if I'm reading satire or they are having some fun trolling.
Of course RMS understood the overtone perfectly, but Vrije Universiteit (vu.nl) is the real name of the university. Its name can be translated to "liberated university". As I understand it, it's a free university in the sense that historically, students of all religions were eligible to attend, as opposed to e.g. Katholieke Universiteit which was Catholic.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrije_Universiteit_Amsterdam" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrije_Universiteit_Amsterdam</a>
The librarated part means free from government control. Until the VU all Dutch universities belonged (indirectly) to the Dutch government.
I think the part that he - and you - missed is that tuition at the time was entirely free, so it wasn't just 'free' in one sense of the word.
Sounds like Katholieke Universiteit ought to release their own Compiler Kit ;)
Vrije as in "Not Catholic", not as in beer.
The adjective meaning "free" is "vrij" or "vrije" in Dutch.<p>Amusingly, the Dutch verb "vrijen" does, in fact, mean to have sex.
UniPress, RMS's arch enemy Evil Software Hoarder, sold a commercial version of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit as well as Gosling's Emacs.<p><a href="https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/92-04-041" rel="nofollow">https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/92-04-041</a><p>UniPress made a PostScript back-end for ACK that they marketed with the NeWS version Emacs, whose slogan was "C for yourself: PostScript for NeWS!"<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838736">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42838736</a><p>>UniPress ported and sold a commercial version of the "Extended Amsterdam Compiler Kit" for Andrew Tanenbaum for many CPUs and versions of Unix (like they also ported and sold his Unix version of Emacs for James Gosling), so Emacs might have been compiled with ACK on the Cray, but I don't recall.<p>>During the late 80's and early 90's, UniPress's Enhanced ACK cost $9,995 for a full source license, $995 for an educational source license, with front ends for C, Pascal, BASIC, Modula-2, Occam, and Fortran, and backends for VAX, 68020, NS32000, Sparc, 80368, and others, on many contemporary versions of Unix.<p>>Rehmi Post at UniPress also made a back-end for ACK that compiled C to PostScript for the NeWS window system and PostScript printers, called "c2ps", which cost $2,995 for binaries or $14,995 for sources.<p>>Independently Arthur van Hoff wrote a different C to PostScript compiler called "PdB" at the Turing Institute, not related to c2ps. It was a much simpler, more powerful, more direct compiler written from scratch, and it supported object oriented PostScript programming in NeWS, subclassing PostScript from C or C from PostScript. I can't remember how much Turing sold it for, but I think it was less than c2ps.<p><a href="https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/92-04-041" rel="nofollow">https://compilers.iecc.com/comparch/article/92-04-041</a><p><a href="https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/NeScheme.txt" rel="nofollow">https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/NeScheme.txt</a>