“Better late than never. I finally got permission from
Prentice Hall to change the MINIX license to the BSD license. The
lawyers sort of sat on this for two years.“
“Anyway, the new license conditions are below. These are the
same as for Berkeley UNIX. It seems to me better for the users than
GPL since there is no requirement to provide source code. MINIX is
much smaller than Linux and might well be suitable as the operating
system for a watch, camera, or transistor radio. The manufacturer
of, say, a watch might really not want to provide a CD-ROM with the
source code with each watch or even a web site with the source
code, as being too much trouble. The new MINIX license says you can
distribute source if you want to, but you don’t have to. At this
point, for most intents and purposes, MINIX is effectively no
different than being in the public domain. You can do whatever you
want with it.”