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Andy Tanenbaum on 'Who Wrote Linux'

Posted by michael on from the besides-the-tooth-fairy-of-course dept.

Andy Tanenbaum writes "Ken Brown has just released a book on open source code. In it, he claims (1) to have interviewed me, and (2) that Linus Torvalds didn't write Linux. I think Brown is batting .500, which is not bad for an amateur (for people other than Americans, Japanese, and Cubans, this is an obscure reference to baseball). Since I am one of the principals in this matter, I thought it might be useful for me to put my 2 eurocents' worth into the hopper. If you were weren't hacking much code in the 1980s, you might learn something." Tanenbaum's description of the interview process with Brown is classic. See also Slashdot's original story and Linus' reply.

2 of 668 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I like the last bit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I disagree that OS X is an "excellent and fast" operating system, after having used it in a server environment for the past 18 months. They are quite crash-prone.

  2. I guess Stallman will anwer next by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    and it's probably not hard to guess what he did tell in the interview. "No Linus did not write Linux, because it's actually GNU/Linux and consist of a lot of GNU tools and Linus did just write the Kernel". Wanna bet?