7 Jun 2026
0:00 The most used OS you never installed
0:38 Born from spite. The AT&T Unix license ban
1:25 Tanenbaum rewrites an OS from scratch
2:34 Kept too small. Enter Linus Torvalds
3:06 It was never meant to be called Linux
3:44 The umbilical cord. Linux on the Minix filesystem
4:26 The fork that decides everything. BSD vs GPL
5:01 Linux eats the world
5:24 Minix 3 and the reincarnation server
6:26 Ring minus 3. The hidden computer inside Intel
7:15 The answer is Minix
8:32 The open letter. As a courtesy
9:17 Why the license was everything
10:58 What we take home

The most widely deployed operating system on x86 machines is not Windows. It is not Linux. It is Minix. A teaching OS written by Andrew Tanenbaum to get around a license now runs in secret at the deepest privilege level of roughly a billion Intel chips. And its creator found out from the news.

This is the story of an OS born to rebel against a license, and walled inside a black box twenty years later by a license. BSD versus GPL, and why the right license matters more than the best code.

Tanenbaum’s open letter to Intel (the “as a courtesy” letter, original):
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
Tom’s Hardware on the letter and that he learned it from press coverage:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/min…
Tom’s Hardware on Google removing the Minix-based ME (Minnich):
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/goo…
Ronald Minnich’s ELC Europe 2017 talk “Replace Your Exploit-Ridden Firmware with Linux” writeup (CNX Software):
https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/11/…
BleepingComputer, ME runs Minix, Ring minus 3, web server, file system:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news…
Minix on Wikipedia (1987, microkernel, BSD license, ME among supported platforms): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix
Minix 3 on Wikipedia (2005 release, reincarnation server, self-healing):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minix_3
The Freax name and Ari Lemmke renaming it on the FTP server:
https://www.linux.org/threads/how-sho…

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