I remember those days and old arguments well and no need to rehash them.
I will say that most of us look at these arguments in hindsight of today's environment, without regards to the realities of the time - oversimplifying things.
Ah, '87 - the unix wars still going on. Almost a decade of NDA's from the original ATT research unix. Or BSD versions. Heh, *as if* you as a consumer could actually afford the hardware to run it.
OR, if you did get hands on a 286/386 version of pc-based unix, it too was limited with binary-only, or if you bought the unundled source it was nda'd. Maybe 2-3 users max. Nothing to learn from, other than what the binaries let you do.
Or, even if you had access to university or other commercial sites, which did have source, it was so secretly protected that there's no way you are ever going to see it. Nevermind that if you weren't in the know, and didn't have the right connections, you couldn't even get your hands on BSD. It was there, but who you gonna' call as a lowly hobbiest if you weren't in the right circles?
So the micro / monolithic kernel was a minor issue. Far more important was that you got binaries, you go source, and there was NO nda!
Think about it - in a parallel universe, TinyCore could easily be binary only, cost about $1000, be totally unbundled from all it's other parts (compiler, text processing, admin tools etc). And nobody other than a small circle of devs could talk about it among themselves leaving it a system which nobody could learn from.
Heh, the kernel is a minor issue....
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