[wobbleblob]

> Tanenbaums biggest mistake was to try to monetize Minix through Prentice-Hall,

You make it sound like his capitalist motives worked against him.

Writing and publishing educational material was part of his job. Prentice hall had been publishing his books since the 1970's. I'm sure it seemed like the obvious way to publish his educational material - especially since minix wasn't a standalone thing, but it came with a book. Perhaps he even had an exclusive contract with PH. It probably didn't even occur to him that there was another way to publish the software.

Also, in 1991, making software available for download wasn't as straight forward as it is today. There was no www, and very few Europeans had access to the internet. I know for me a book with a disk would have been the only reasonable way to get it.

[sophacles]

In 1997 in the suburbs of Chicago, a book with a CD was the only reasonable way for me to get linux... By that time I "had the internet" but it was 33.6Kbps dial up, beginner resource pages were lacking (so a book to teach me was nice), and downloading a full linux distro was going take to way too long (so CD was the way to go). Particularly as a 17 year old without a credit card to order CDs online from one of the early, untrusted, online merchants.