dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu (David Lawyer) (11/19/89)
It has been sometimes claimed that a good candidate for a free good is one that has low marginal cost (the cost of making another unit of that good). Computer software is an excellent candidate for a free good, since it costs nearly nothing to make another copy of it. I believe that it would be of great social benefit if Minix was made free. By "free" I mean that one would pay only the marginal cost to obtain it (cost of disks, postage & handing etc. [or perhaps nothing if obtained via the net]). Furthermore, the costs of maintaining Minix should be borne by various governments (perhaps by the United Nations). The maintaining of Minix should consist mainly of putting together into a single package the contributions and bug fixes which are donated freely by various Minix users. This maintenance is currently being done by Andy Tanenbaum, but it is becoming too much work for one person. If the Minix of the future become useful to business, its being free will help reduce prices since it will reduce business expense. While most business will not voluntarily reduce price due to lower costs, competition (and sometimes regulation) often forces them to pass most of such saving on to the consumer. Realizing this, there would be more motivation for users to make contributions to Minix (if it were free) and more Minix software should become available. Under present circumstances, one may not feel like contributing to Minix if the results will not be freely available to others and if Prentice Hall might wind up making a little money on what you have done (but not pay you for it). Thus I propose that Minix should become both an educational tool and a practical operating system with many students throughout the world making real (but usually small) contributions to its development, motivated in part by the possibility that what they are doing will be of significant benefit to others. The future of Minix would look much brighter if the goal is to make it free software. David Lawyer (student, University of California at Irvine, USA)