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Andy Tanenbaum on 'Who Wrote Linux'
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.
Whi is writing the history? the winner or the who loose?
It seems that as of now no written history is correct, who can we trust? Buy a book for ×$ and learn history that is incorrect is not good.
------- In the end there are no begining
And there are no well-respected programmers who would agree with that point of view then?
In old world media, who creates something of value is more important than what gets created. Hence there is often alot of slander, lies, and outright fraud (and a lot of crapy media). In Hollywood, it's so bad it's pratically institutionalized.
I think the enemies of Linux are trying a similar strategy based on the addage "if you kill the shepard - the sheep will scatter", "If you lie about something long enough or hard enough, people will believe it". They can't discredit Linux for technological or commercial reasons anymore, so their only option is to discredit Linus. With billions at stake, it could get nasty.
Why are microkernels a bad idea?
They aren't, any more than monolithic kernels are a bad idea. The general whine against microkernels goes something along the lines of, "Any performance increases that result from a microkernel can be matched by simply tweaking a monolithic kernel, therefore why bother with the complexity of a microkernel?"
Well, there are certainly benefits to a modular micro-kernel design. I wouldn't deny it (and haven't). But there are also drawbacks (message passing is terribly hard to make secure in a multi-tasking context, and is frequently slower than dirt. Add to that some of the braindead design decisions of the x386 w.r.t. privileged processes...) Yuck.
Treating the micro v. monolithic debate as a solved problem ("microkernels win!") is as idiotic as suggesting that object orientation is the ideal solution to all programming problems.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Credit Mr. Tanenbaum sticking to his guns on the micro kernel design. But the brilliance of Linus is that he realises you must first have features to fight!
an ill wind that blows no good
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
> 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)
Right. I could have guessed what sport it came from, but what does it mean, exactly?
I thought one particularly interesting part in the Tanenbaum article was that it seemed pretty clear that Brown hadn't done any reading about Unix before hand. For something like this you surely spend a few weeks reading up at home and making notes before you fly to Holland and interview someone. Smells very fishy to me.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
What more needs to be said !
I think he made such a big stink about it during the infamous flame war that, even if it was somehow proven that a macro-kernel is a better design, Tanenbaum could never back down from his premise without losing face.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
I personally think Microkernels are *still* a good idea. A well-designed one is extremely modular, often extremely small (yeah, I know: "duh") and very portable, and the small-chunk approach can make them a lot easier to understand. On top of this, you can seperate the different parts of the kernel from each other, so there's far less likelihood of different pieces stepping on others, drivers can (theoretically) be run in user-space (if such a thing applies)...
;-)
However, like anything, they are *not* going to be a perfect panacea. If the design is not just right, they can end up being far worse than the mono-kernels they are often competing with.
The Mach MK is one where kernel-developers complain frequently about trying to get drivers to work with it, its message-passing architecture being unable/difficult to use in certain important ways, etc, etc, whereas I've heard a lot of praise for the L4 design.
In fact, isn't TRON/iTRON (etc) a MK-style design? If it weren't for the US Trade Dept, it'd probably be running on your Desktop, PDA, Washing-machine, Wrist-watch, TV.....
Anyway, it feels a bit like the difference between OO and Procedural coding, where OO projects tend to suffer without a reasonable amount of design effort *before* starting to code, but make maintenance simpler over the life of the project, and Functional-style tends to allow you to get stuck in, but can make maintenance and/or functionality upgrades more difficult. In fact, even down to the usual blaming of OO-style for creating slower code.
Horses for courses; but I'd love there to be a full-fledged Linux-style OS (FOSS, good driver support, etc) running on a MK. Just because
I believe he's just annoyed. After all his teaching and even writing an example of how an operating system should be, he feels Linus didn't pay attention, and that if he had, Linux would be much better. Nothing seems to annoy teachers more than those darn kids who don't pay attention and run off and try something on their own.
He wrote Minix as an educational tool in the hope that someone would take the example and do great things. Someone did... but went off in a slightly different direction than was hoped.
How about Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Panamanians, Dominicans, Venezuelans, Koreans, Colombians and others who also play baseball? :)
Performance of the compiler is probably more guilty when it comes to overall performance than the kernel. Further you are comparing apples with oranges comparing a Mac to a PC when it comes to compiling...
While it was humorous to hear the account of the "interview", the article was spoiled by Tanenbaum's regrets, continuingly sour grapes, and display of hubris.
I don't think Tanenbaum is bitter. He just wants to point this out.
Since I don't think anyone here has RTFA'd (/. effect and all) it's not worth judging right now. I think it's pretty classy of Tanenbaum to step up and offer some perspective on the AdTI FUD. If he does that as someone who still doesn't buy into Linux, that makes it all the more credible. Do we really want every response to this to be written by a Linux fanboy?
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Bitter much?
Perhaps, just perhaps mind you, he is simply stating what, in his opinion, is true.
KFG
I dont think Linus or anyone else has tried to conceal or hide the origins of linux. Anyone who has taken more than a passing interest in the history of linux knows that Linus got interested in kernel development while hacking Minix which was supplied in source code form in an educational book called "Operating Systems: Their design and Implementation". Rebel Code (Glynn Moody) is an excellent history of linux and open source and a great read. If people are interested in getting a good background its a great place to start.
I think its fair to say that "shock horror!" Andy Tanenbaum probably "learned" how to write Minix from somewhere else. In any case in the initial phases of Linux I think its fair to say that Linus did 99% of the work. And after the seed was planted.. well lots of people are now involoved with writing linux.
Its the nature of the beast almost all human acheivements are adaptations of something that came before . Its called development and its incredibly difficult to come up with an idea that doesnt have its basis in something else.
I challenge anyone to try and come up with an idea that doesnt have its origins in something else.
nick
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
Whatever anyone does - do not read Brown's book when it comes out.
Thanks to Mr. Tanenbaum, we have the proof here:
People can create operating systems on their own. Even UNIX-like operating systems. Linus learned from Mr. Tanenbaum. Linus wrote the first kernel, published it and asked for input, which the rest of the world provided.
Linus then acted as a proper project manager, and the rest is history.
So again, whatever people do - do not buy the book.
Now, here's the problem: if we talk about this upcoming book, people will want to buy it. It's the Gibson Effect - the more its denounced, the more people will want to read it, and next thing you know there will be lines of people at the bookstores claiming they can see Jesus's face on this book.
So instead, I recommend to all intelligent folks in the programming community: ignore it. From here on out, don't even refer to the book by name, or its foundation, or the author. The more we pretend it doesn't exist and it's not important, the less interest people will have in it. If someone asks (such as a Pointy Haired Boss guy), shrug and lie as you say "No idea. I heard it was some book, but that it wasn't that good." And then shut up and leave it at that.
Don't give these guys free advertising. Don't even give them an ounce of respect, they don't deserve it.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
It's what drives them to make stuff, and attempt to make better stuff than the next guy. If they all got along we'd all still be using SLS!
As it is the arguments and many different flavors of Linux have helped all of us, and brought a great many things to the Linux world. When all the developers stop arguing and dissing each other, that's when -I'll- get worried.
12 years ago, who would have imagined that it is normal and in fact essential for a desktop OS to be able to smoothly handle many IO intensive processes at the same time?
Thanks for setting the record straight.
And especially for being brave enough to address the problem of political repression and scapegoating, if albeit a little obliquely.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I know many in the Linux community like to paint Mr. Tanenbaum as a bitter lunatic, but this is a great article, one that every Linux user/zealot should read.
First, he goes into the history of why people were souring on UNIX and the various independently-written UNIXalikes. These were mostly individual projects, which really sets the record straight for the people who seem to think that Linus was the first person to do this, and that Linus was somehow the only person intelligent and manly enough to write his own kernel.
At the same time, he lays out the history of UNIX clones, of which Linux was definitely one. It's surprising to me how many people seem to think of Linux as a great, independent OS, and fight so hard to deny that it has roots in UNIX. Of course these people are mostly young and don't know much about computer history. In that respect, this is an educational article.
And, yes, he does talk about the micro vs. monolithic kernel issue, but he does so without fanaticism, and, you know, what he says is generally correct. He's all for small and reliable software, which is something that UNIX was originally but rapidly became the antithesis of. Performance issues, back when people were using 4.77 and 8 MHz desktop processors, well, let's just say that things were different then. Now you have people writing big applications in Python. The real reason Linux ended up with a monolithic kernel is because that's what Linus understood and it was easier for him to write that way.
. . .so why does he feel the need to reopen the argument. . .
The argument was never closed.
He brought the issue up for exactly the reasons stated, to explain why, despite some people's feelings, that he and Linus are not "enemies."
In other words, that he has nothing to be bitter about, so his "defending" Linus isn't in any way anomylous. Seemed perfectly natural to me, and he took the same "dig" at Windows.
KFG
Tanenbaum basically says "MINIX's design and Linux's design are quite different, and MINIX's is unarguably superior." Theres just no need for that second clause.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
In the information age, there is no neutral technology that can distinguish between free speech content and copyright content - in the end, to impose them, you half to have someone watching and approving. So if we loose the battle to secure freedom in the technology space, then we will loose the battle in the free speech space too - and the conesequences that go with that are well known.
There were systems long before CP/M that similar characteristics. Better, though, in that at least some of them didn't have the "C drive, D drive" crapola that lingers in Windows and VMS. Well, CP/M had A drive and allowed it to be swapable on the fly because who could afford more than one tiny drive anyways. Doesn't anybody remember RT-11 and its predecessors? Or OS/8, or PS/8, written originally over a weekend by Richie Lary to mimic TOPS-10. Pfaugh. Can one person write an operating system, sure. One person can write more than one operating system. That Linus should have followed the "two weeks in the lab can save an hour in the library every time" philosophy on Linux is no surprise. We would have been better off had he spent his energies to flesh out Net-2, but he's better off having done what he did.
I don't have to read the book -particularly after reading Tanenbaum's very convincing presentation that the author doesn't know dick about intellectual property, not to mention he was basically lying about writing a book about the history of Unix, when it is clear his notion from the get go was to write a book titled "SCO is telling the truth about Linux - Really!" The quote above makes it clear that rather than bother to, oh, find some actual copyrighted code in Linux that is stolen, he is arguing the stellar logic that:
1) Open source advocates are contemptuous of copyright law
2) People who are contemptuous of copyright law are plagiarists
3) The people who wrote Linux are open source advocates...
Remind me what de Toqueville said about weaselly corporate shills again?
A quote from the Yahoo article -
"The report," according to Gregory Fossedal, a Tocqueville senior fellow, "raises important questions that all developers and users of open source code must face. While you cannot group all open source programmers and programs together; many are rigorous and respectful of the intellectual property rights, while others speak of intellectual property rights with open contempt." -Emphasis, again, added.
Get it? Failing evidence for any credible claim that they are actually TREATING intellectual property rights with contempt, they will note that they "speak" of them with open contempt... as if there were something wrong with that.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
GLX ( GNU, Linux, XWindows ), an alternative name for the operating system is very fair, IMHO.
You can't do much with just the kernel ( linux ).
You can't do much with just the software GNU made
You can't do much with just XWindows.
Give everyone credit for "GLX".
I think it is catchier sounding the "Linux" and a whole let less clunky then "GNU/Linux'.
Steve
Writing a simple OS kernel is easy. I wrote one, and believe me, it wasn't that hard. At the university where I am a grad student, we require the undergrads to write most of an OS kernel (including virtual memory and a filesystem) in a one-semester course. I read alt.os.development regularly, and there are high school students who are writing OS kernels. (I'm often depressed by the fact that they are much better programmers than I am :-)
Writing a scalable, production-quality OS kernel is another matter entirely. That takes hundreds or thousands of person-years by talented programmers.
Ken Brown is obviously a complete shithead if he doesn't understand this distinction. AST's rebuttal made the facts of the matter abundantly clear, and I'm sure any competent OS developer he asked would have told him the same thing.
There's a little bit more to it than that.
The microkernel idea derives from one basic principle: anything that doesn't need to run in kernelspace, shouldn't be in kernelspace.
There are several hypothetical benefits to this approach. For one, code that executes in kernel space is trusted. You'll notice that a lot of CS academics advocate microkernel architectures. It's because the less you have in the kernel, the easier it is to verify the kernel. The fewer the set of kernel primitives you have, the easier it is to reason about how the kernel will behave. In modern microkernels (see: L4, or it's free variant Fiasco), pretty much the only thing of importance left in kernel space is the scheduler, process management, and a few basic stubs for memory management. Most of the memory management implementation itself is pulled out into userspace.
The other benefit of microkernels is that they allow the system to be more flexible, when designed correctly. For example, having drivers in userspace means that you don't have the Linux issue with having to match driver versions with kernel versions. Another good example is that you _still_ cannot reasonably mount filesystems as a non-priviledged user in Linux. It's not unreasonable to expect that if you have access to a filesystem image, and you have access to the mount point, that you be allowed to extend the mount point with a view into the filesystem that you have control of. It should be possible, but it's not - mostly because the FS core is embedded into the kernel. And yes, there are kernel modules that promote the VFS layer to userspace - and they work pretty well. But there's really no need to have an artificial distinction between userspace FS impementations and kernelspace. There's nothing special about parsing directory and file structures that really needs to be in the kernel.
There are, and always will be, performance hits associated with moving kernel stuff into userspace. You necessarily have to have context switches for message passing - which has to be implemented in the kernel to be trusted in a microkernel design. The question is wether you think the benefits of microkernel design are worth that tradeoff.
I think they are. A 10% hit in performance is going to get eaten up as hardware gets better and faster. But that 50% increase in manageability and flexibility is going to pay dividends well into the future.
-Laxitive
Maybe we should consult Royal and Chaz Tanenbaum. This whole thing about Linux not being the author of Linux is about as funny as the artwork from the Movie the "Royal Tenenbaums". Absurdities like these really make me laugh...
no you didn't mean linux, i'm sure you meant MINIX
Quote from Tannenbaum:
That's when I discovered that (1) he had never heard of the patent, (2) did not know what it meant to dedicate a patent (i.e., put it in the public domain), and (3) really did not know a thing about intellectual property law. He was confused about patents, copyrights, and trademarks.
Do you not find it strange that the President of an organisation involved in arguments about patents, copyrights and trademarks should be so ignorant of patents, copyrights and trademarks?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
>> Certainly nobody envisioned the kind of systems
>> we'd be running today
Total BULLSHIT. By that time, we already had seen mini-computer systems go from the size of a large refrigerator to a single IC. Any CIS prof that couldn't see "beefier PC's" coming in 1991 should have turned back in his PhD.
By 1991, PC's were already running a class of cpu that could be described as "VAX on an IC". Only slightly beefier CISC machines were running as Sun Workstations.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Bullocks!
The cheaper machines (not clones) were MORE likely to have 32bit addressing and memory protection. Kludge Klones were more expensive and behind the curve (as usual).
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Actually... didn't MS get its start writing BASIC compilers??
I'm the first to disagree with anyone who says that Bill Gates isn't a very smart guy. He's got programming skills and incredible business smarts. However, he didn't write DOS, it was a clone of CP/M bought from another seattle company and then resold to IBM. story.
You are right of course, that each engineering marvel builds on something previously. If all the tech in the world were removed, we might know how to build cars and houses and put together computer systems, but we'd never know how to put together a hammer with stones and sticks, or fashion steel and silicone out of iron and sand. It would be interesting, wouldn't it? We'd have to start out with that old tech, to get back to this new stuff.
Anyways. idiots complain about Microsoft all the time, stupidly. But smart people do too - and there are plenty of good arguments against MS that don't require ignorance. The debate will continue. Hopefully Linux will get better, and the computing experience in general will get better. We'll see.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Thirteen years ago, I didn't give a flying FUCK about how outdatated Linus' monolithic kernel was. Remember, we were all running DOS, and desperate to break out of real mode hell.
Arguing about monolithic versus microkernel was like arguing about whether a starving man's meal should be vegetarian or not.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I love how Linux zealots like to rant about "freedom" and then get their panties in a twist when someone uses their freedom of speech to criticize Linux.
Theres just no need for that second clause.
Sure there is. It adds detail, and makes the speaker more credible, because it proves that the topic is actually something he cares heavily about. Demonstrating passion is a way to quickly prove that although your beliefs might not be perfectly correct, you've at least spent a lot of time and effort researching them, and are thus an informed source.
And from another perspective: show that he is still antagonistic to Linus's system gives him even more credibility. If a friend vouches for you, that might be discounted as a buddy covering for you- but if an enemy says you're innocent, then he's got no motivation to lie on your behalf.
(This reminds me in a roundabout way of Iraq today: the US Army "raiding" Chalabadi's headquarters, and he's publically "upset" about it. But they could've really been trying to help him gain power in Iraq, because the common people won't trust a leader who's too friendly to the USA. An OT example of how people can be easier to categorize by counting their enemies rather than their supporters)
A 20% performance hit really doesn't matter. Look at the rate of speed increases in hardware. When new systems come out doubling performance at such a regular pace, a one-time 20% slowdown to switch to an otherwise superior architecture with other benefits is an easy pill to swallow.
Of course, I don't think microkernels are a superior archeticture to begin with, and I think that a bland "20%" isn't a reasonable estimate of the real-world application or database's performance loss, so I still disagree with Andy.
I'm of the view that the differences between micro and monolithic kernels are really a question of where you place things in a semantic sense. Just as one can write OO code in C, one can write well-isolated modular code in a monolithic kernel. I'd rather have the burden of that modularization taken care of on the developer's end than at runtime.
11*43+456^2
The bitter part comes in the last couple of paragraphs, where he takes the opportunity to say that Linus was a misguided kid who should have paid more attention in class such that he would have seen the obvious superiority of a microkernel over a macrokernel. But he's quick to point out that he and Linus are not enemies.
When I read it, to me it came across as a gentle rub, more good natured than bitter. Alas, when reading text, very often it is hard to determine the mind set of the author at the time of witing...
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
From everything I've read, I'd say Linus is anything but casual about freedom. What he is *not* is an idealist. That's what we have RMS for. He's a pragmatist, exactly the kind of person you want in charge of an engineering project. Perhaps not the person you want at the head of a movement, but that's not what he is. He's first and foremost an engineer.
If you want to "secure our freedoms in the technology space" with F/OSS, you need to actually have F/OSS that works well to convince the 99.99% of the world to whom the need and benefit is not intuitively obvious. If all we had were a bunch of RMS clones, we'd be a lot worse off, because he scares the hell out of business types, who are much more concerned with the economic benefits of F/OSS that Linus Torvalds provides.
We need leaders with a variety of different strengths to spread the message to people with a variety of different interests. Linus Torvalds does an excellent job selling the benefits of F/OSS to engineers. The fact that he lets people like Eben Moglen handle the freedom side doesn't mean that he's causing any harm. If Eben Moglen spent his precious time hacking kernel code, we'd all be worse off.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
A 20% performance hit really doesn't matter. Look at the rate of speed increases in hardware. When new systems come out doubling performance at such a regular pace, a one-time 20% slowdown to switch to an otherwise superior architecture with other benefits is an easy pill to swallow.
Good theory. Practice seems to work out differently.
Speed comparisons between products. Seems like 5% difference is enough to declare a clear winner. Unless you look behind the curtain.
Speed increases in hardware? At work I have two computers. I am typing this on NT4 on a 400MHz Gateway. My "other" computer is XP on a 2.4GHz Dell. Other than some legacy dBase for DOS applications the "faster" computer isn't any faster. It does boot faster which means that the XP machine is booted a lot more often than the NT. A 20% performance hit would be the same 20% on both machines.
The quoted improved performance doesn't quite translate into reality. A legitimate 10-times performance (IBM 1410 to IBM 370/135) transated into a 2-times difference in actual throughput. By the way, going the other direction won't work. As a rule of thumb, you will feel 90% of all slowdowns and only 10% of all speedups. This works both directions, like the "uphill both ways" quip.
I think Andrew lays things out quite nicely in this article. So hopefully Brown will crawl back under the rock he came from.
Also Tanenbaum made one of my favorite comments, something like this...
The wonderful thing about standards, is there are so many to choose from.
Tanenbaum is one the best minds in Computer Science.
.... was a Jew. Just so you weigh again your previous comment....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
maybe even talk to some of the actual PRISONERS who were featured in the famous photos or housed at the prison
Dead men tell no tales...
I really have to figure out how to do this scam. Get money from big corporations
They started off taking money from the Swiss. The process seems to go something like this:
1. Get some hack-journalist experience (overfunded and obscure policy journals publish damn near anything; ditto for the Washington Times, as long as it purports to be conservative).
2. Get to know rich people
--a. get cushy internships in college
--b. marry a lawyer at a Big Firm
3. Convince the rich people you know to pay you for hack journalism.
4. Use hack journalism to push dubious foreign-investment schemes
5. PROFIT!!!
The key is that business, academia, law, journalism and government don't really know how to function with one another. They want to, for both good and bad reasons, so a lot of the time they're willing to throw big money conferences, fellowships, publications and "research institutions" that are supposed to grease the wheels.
Added to this, washed-up bigwigs usually want some place to go, and their former friends often set up make-work jobs for them. Lose an election? Why don't you give a lecture once a month at my public policy school. Get shitcanned from your CEO job? Why don't you sit on my government advisory committee. Newspaper column dried up? How bout you be a fellow at my think-tank. And of course, all of these people need gophers, personal assistants, research aides, etc. - a whole industry of suckups scurrying around washups.
The pay is peanuts for the honorees, sometimes even nonexistent. But they like the honorary titles. In exchange, the institution that hands out the titles gets more prestige from having Big Names attached to it. Look at the name-dropping on AdTI website: Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich (Republicans), John Norquist (Democrat). In turn, the aura of Big Names clustered around an institution makes it easier to sucker donors.
That's basically the scam: laundering prestige for money. All you have to do is Know People(tm).
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
He brought it up because it proves the point that Linus wrote Linux. If he had copied MINIX Linux would've been a microkernel design instead of a macro one.
The fact that Linus wrote Linux "wrong", proves he wrote it and didn't steal it.
Actually, the real context is damning. His real reason for damning multitasking for MINIX is "no-one on a home PC will ever want to run more than one job at a time."
If by "home PC" you mean an Intel x86 machine, and put that into the context of way things were looking around 1990, that is an entirely reasonable standpoint. Not very many people ever did do much multitasking on 386es.
Most people around then (myself included) did not think the x86 architecture was going to hang around much longer. It is quite clear that Tanenbaum shared the majority view at the time, that RISC was the way to go.
Also, the design goals of MINIX, clearly stated by Tanenbaum, (see his book, I've read it.) was for MINIX to be an educational tool, and run on low-end (e.g. 286) PC:s. He was not planning MINIX to be a production-quality system. He did not want to add 386-specific features.
You should not dismiss Tanenbaum so lightly, he most likely is far more knowledgeable on these subjects than you or I. It's like saying Einstein was a moron because he didn't grok quantum theory.
I don't know, perhaps you're a Linux zealot who wants to believe that Linus is always right. But the reason this entire debate is so well-known is that both sides raise valid points. The difference is in their intentions and design goals, not in the facts.
I saw the original AdT slander on yahoo via reuters (I think).
Can ESR or some other evangelist work to get an abridged version of AST's response on a major news wire?
While preaching to the slashdot and other choirs is fun, getting the story into the same channels that the AdT report was in would be more helpful.
The nonsense coming out out of AdTI together with Andrew Tanenbaum's description of his interview make me wonder whether the speculation that Microsoft is behind this is really correct. Microsoft has tons of money and some fairly smart people, even in management. I find it hard to believe that they couldn't do a better job than this. Even if they need a putatively independent institution as a front, they could write the material themselves. They could even have their chosen institution hire somebody halfway competant for the project. It's hard to believe that they couldn't do better than this.
I wonder if this is perhaps just somebody trying to make a name for himself and/or bring in money for himself or his institute rather than something directly arranged by Microsoft.
very true. also, Tanenbaum I think ignores the kernel module and abstration layers in the kernel. one of the points of a message passage system is to have proper interfaces defined so that subsystems can be replaced and interchanged. For people that have watched kernel development over the years, those design benefits are basically in the Linux kernel. yeah it may be "monolithic" in the OS kernel theory deisgn aspect, but it incorporates the design abstrations of a "microkernel" without the performance hits (for the most part on both counts).
It is not unlike the whole GNU/linux argument that Stallman keeps bringing up. Stallman fundamentaly believes in the GNU and what it stands for.
Linus isn't to concerned about ideals. That is his secret. He is rather pragmatic and makes the choice that works right now. It is why it is the cute little penguin and not some super slick logo or the BSD devil that is the symbol for everything MS is not. Minix, BSD, hurd. All are free and true to some higher ideal about software. But linux rules them all in actually being used.
Tanenbaum and Stallman are the shoulders Linux stands on (with a lot of others of course) but at the same time it is also betraying them a little. That tanenbaum and Stallman can't help but point this out makes them real human people. Not some politically correct mouthpiece. I like them all the more for it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I contend with the characterization of the last para as 'ragging'.
The tone I got was of an affectionate tip o' the hat to what is surely one of the all-time classic flame wars.
Besides, when you >make menuconfig, and you go through there and choose whether you want various bits compiled into the kernel or loaded as modules,
isn't that an admission that the 'truth' on the modular/monolithic argument falls somewhere in the mote in the eye of the Tannenbaum/Torvalds Tempest?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear