Editing Minix (section)

==Licensing==
At the time of MINIX's original development, its [[software license|license]] was relatively liberal. Its licensing fee was very small ($69) relative to those of other operating systems. Tanenbaum wished for MINIX to be as accessible as possible to [[student]]s, but his publisher was unwilling to offer material (such as the source code) that could be copied freely, so a restrictive license requiring a nominal fee (included in the price of Tanenbaum's book) was applied as a compromise. This prevented the use of MINIX as the basis for a freely distributed software system.

When [[free and open-source software|free and open-source]] Unix-like operating systems such as [[Linux]] and [[386BSD]] became available in the early 1990s, many [[Volunteering|volunteer]] [[software developer]]s abandoned MINIX in favor of these. In April 2000, MINIX became [[free and open-source software]] under the [[BSD licenses|BSD-3-Clause]] license, which was retroactively applied to all previous versions.<ref name="bsd3clause"/><ref name="retroactive-2000"/>  However, by this time other operating systems had surpassed its capabilities, and it remained primarily an operating system for students and [[hobbyist]]s. In late 2005, MINIX was relicensed with a fourth clause added to the [[BSD licenses|BSD-3-Clause]] license.<ref name="bsd34clause"/>