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From: ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: New MINIX available (UNIX clone with full source code)
Message-ID: <7571@star.cs.vu.nl>
Date: 15 Sep 90 15:05:03 GMT
References: <1990Sep11.073655.6259@monu6.cc.monash.edu.au> <7559@star.cs.vu.nl> <90257.232245UH2@psuvm.psu.edu>
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In article <90257.232245UH2@psuvm.psu.edu> UH2@psuvm.psu.edu (Lee Sailer) writes:
>Minix is not really a "UNIX clone" in the sense that a COMPAQ is an
>IBM clone, for example.  
If by "clone" you mean "an exact replicated, indistinguishable from the
orginal," then an awful lot of MS-DOS machines are not clones.  If they were,
the compatibility list posted here periodically would contain only "YES"
entries, and a large volume of the traffic here would not be necessary.

>No doubt Minix 2.0 is much improved, but I still doubt it is a "clone"
>to the degree that Mach is.  Or Coherent, or whatever (what was it?
>Wendin dos?)

Mach is not a clone of UNIX.  It IS UNIX.  The Mach 2.5 kernel contains
most of the 4.3 BSD inside of it, which in turn, cotains thousands of
lines of AT&T code.  You cannot get Mach if you do not have an AT&T
source license.  This said, Mach also supports a large number of features
not present in UNIX (ports, threads, etc.).  I hardly think this qualifies
for clonedom.

Coherent, in contrast, is a genuine attempt at being a UNIX clone.  Whether
it is any good or not, I can't really say.  A couple of months ago, there
was a lot of discussion here, using the subject line: Re: Coherent - A lemon,
or something like that.

As to MINIX 1.5, it is not a plug-to-plug replacement for UNIX at the moment,
but has a number of POSIX features (all the header files are ANSI and POSIX
conformant, for example).  It also comes with close to 200 utilities, most
of which are similar to UNIX. Thus I think both MINIX and Coherent are both
approximately closes, perhaps in the sense that a Tandy 1000 is a PC clone
(i.e., sort of similar in spirit but different in some details).

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)