MINIX (from Mini and Unix) is a free Unix-based operating system designed by Andrew Tanenbaum in 1987. MINIX later inspired Linus Torvalds to design Linux. Its latest stable release is 3.2.0 and developer snapshot is 3.2.1. Although originally designed as a hobby of Tanenbaum, it was later released as open source and is now developed by contributors. A key difference between MINIX and Linux, is the fact that MINIX uses a microkernel, instead of a monolithic kernel, so that in theory, Minix would be more portable than Linux, across different processor architectures.