You still have to sign non-disclosure agreements for some things.
Interesting. I didn’t know that.
Calling it a Minix clone is the sticking point because, as you said, it has no elements of the Minix design in it, and indeed explicitly rejected that design, which you also agree with. It is, instead, a clone of the older systems Minix also drew some inspiration from, collectively referred to as “Unix” even though they had, by that time, been divergent for over a decade.
To me, for something to be a Minix clone instead of a Unix clone, it has to have features Minix has and Unix lacked, and Linux really did not and, to my knowledge, does not. The closest it came was implementing the Minix filesystem, albeit most definitely not in the Minix fashion.