Ask HN: Is Minix dead? No commits since 2018
Pretty much, yeah.<p><a href="https://groups.google.com/g/minix3/c/nUG1NwxXXkg" rel="nofollow">https://groups.google.com/g/minix3/c/nUG1NwxXXkg</a><p>Short story as I watched it: Tanenbaum got a couple grants totalling several million Euro.  He hired some of his grad students to work on making it a production system.  They made a lot of improvements, research-wise, but they also sort of made a mess of things.  What they didn't do is set up any reasonable project infrastructure (e.g., a bug tracker) that would allow Minix as a project to grow into a healthy, thriving project at a size beyond those who were being paid to work on it, and for it to outlive their interest in it.  The userspace was largely replaced by NetBSD's, and that involved clang replacing ack, so builds went from ~10 minutes to 3+ hours.  Lots of small stuff like this, adding up to a project where no one is willing to exercise ownership and few outsiders are equipped to deal with it in its current state (even if interested).<p>The best thing that you could do if you want Minix to be a thing is to prepare yourself for a deep dive and <i>not</i> look to "the community" with the belief that there is some consensus/approval to be had.  Take charge in a fork of your own and make it the project you want it to be.  If you wait for anyone else to take ownership, you're going to be waiting for a long time.  If Minix is "dead", it's because poor ownership + the bystander effect killed it.<p>Shades of excuses #1, #2, and #3 from jwz's "nomo zilla" are pretty appropriate here as well.