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More Responses to de Tocqueville Hatchet Job
akahige writes "Fresh from the debunking of the 'Linus couldn't possibly have written an OS without ripping someone off' book published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, Tanenbaum has published an email he got from the consultant hired to do the code comparison between MINIX and Linux. Among other juicy comments, 'pay no attention to this man.' (There was no stolen code, either.) In related matters, ESR was apparently sent a pre-release excerpt of the book which he completely eviscerates with his usual zeal. Another story on NewsForge." See our previous stories if you're coming to this late.
It's reasonable that he was emotionally worked up writing this reply, but the stuttery nature (so many paragraphs of only two sentences!) made it particularly hard to read. It felt incoherent and rushed, like new insults were going straight from brain to keyboard with no later revision.
A note to email users - it's very easy to make a bad impression with informal writing style!
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
I think the main question that should be asked here, is who is behind the Hatchet Job? Best guesses are SCO and/or Microsoft.
Any further ideas?
He says,
Context and interfaces are everything; unless it has been packaged into a library specifically intended to move, moving software between projects is more like an organ transplant, with utmost care needed to resect vessels and nerves. The kind of massive theft you are implying is not just contingently rare, it is necessarily rare because it is next to impossible.
Then 5 paragraphs down,
That a piece of code came from a proprietary vendor is no guarantee that it originated there. Proprietary outfits lift code from elsewhere all the time.
Sort of contradictory, no? To paraphrase, First he says it's very hard to lift code from elsewhere. Then he says, But some people do it all the time.
Way before Linux was on anyone's radar, Eric S. Raymond was Usenet's resident expert on Unix opreating systems for the IBM PC and other personal computers. He published a FAQ regularly and reviewed all the personal i386 Unix systems of the day such as Esix, uPort, and SCO. Eric has been at it a long time, and really knows the his stuff.
If you can't be good, be controversial. All this publicity is just going to sell more books.
I remember the controversy that existed over "The Satanic Verses" by Salman Rushdie. The novel was proclaimed as blashphemous to Islam, and a fatwah death sentence was pronounced on the author. Of course, the book sold out as fast as they could print copies. A student friend of mine at the time was proudly showing off his brand new hard copy edition he just bought, even though he could hardly afford his next meal. (He considered this a real prize, as they were selling so fast, it was hard to find a copy anywhere) So I started reading. It was an awful, improbable piece of literature, that undoubtably would have sold no more than a few thousand copies if not for the controversy.
I also remember a story about a US art dealer who was tasked with unloading several thousand prints of a sitting nude from an obsure french painter nobody had heard of. So he displayed the original painting in the front of the store, secretly paid some children a few coins to stand and gawk at it, while calling up the leader of the then equivalent of the "moral majority" with an anonymous tip. He got himself arrested for displaying indecent material, and beat the rap in a high profile trial. Of course the prints all sold out quickly, and the original painting fetched a sizable fortune at auction.
My rights don't need management.
The third paragraph says that software can't be moved, "next to impossible". Then shortly after says that MS swiped the TCP/IP stack from BSD.
I sorta lost interest after that...
Not to say code was stolen or his other points are wrong, but his assertion that code can't be lifted I completely disagree with and to start a response with such a crappy premise and then contradict yourself right away doesn't seem like a good plan of attack.
I'm sure that the people that employ this 'institute' will either never hear about this or wont care. In short nothing will come of this.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
It is quite well known that Linus started developing Linux on Minix, before it was self-hosting. I don't see anybody saying otherwise.
However, the issue is copy-pasting of source code from Minix, not whether Minix was helpful to the development of Linux or not.
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by. --Douglas Adams
From ESR's journal: The point is this: Microsoft (legally) took BSD code, and the only way we know about it is through behavioural analysis.
I call Bullshit:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2004/2/15/71552/7 795/98#98
To quote the poster for those of you too lazy to click:
So how can I be so sure about that Microsoft is using BSD licensed code? Well, the BSD license(s) require that the copyright holder is credited in documentation provided with binary distributions of the code. In their release notes for their Windows XP operating system, Microsoft credits a bunch of well-known copyright holders of open source products. It contains credits not only to the University of California at Berkeley, but also companies such as Hewlett-Packard and to individuals such as Luigi Rizzo and Phil Karn.
ESR, If you're going to be a proper advocate for free source, please be correct about the information you post. Otherwise, you're not much better than Tocqueville in that regard.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Yes.
The way I read the article, he's saying that massive code theft is rare and next to impossible for open source developers, because the nature of OSS makes it very hard to conceal such theft; but that closed source developers (i.e., proprietary software companies) can and do steal code frequently, because it's so hard to prove they did it.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
If Linus's reputation is being harmed by patently false and uncorroborated information for the sake of selling books, does that allow him to sue for slander? If so, any lawyers want to take up this case? Brown is getting a lot of free publicity, and other than the messages on slashdot, I don't see articles on CNET or eweek etc. taking up the other side of the story. A lawsuit would shed light on the book's information gathering practices, or lack thereof.
By the way, the garage sales in the very upper-crusty 'burbs around Redmond make for great places to pick up fairly new tech books for cheap, and now's the season!
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I've been around as long as ESR has and I simply don't recognise half of what he describes as the hacker culture. His butchery of the Jargon File is evidence of this.
His knowledge of UNIX history is pretty much spot on, but then again so is the knowledge of thousands of others, why do we listen to him? He's a self publicist and little else.
No, he's a hero for utterly destroying Brown's book. The book tries to imply that Linux took code from Minix.
Linus says that didn't happen. Fine, but he could be lying. Now _Andy_ says it didn't happen, and they both have no problems with each other.
So the book is utterly pointless. There's no needle, no copying, nothing -- and BOTH sides have stated that!
Andy is a hero (well, a bit of a hero!) for coming out, being talkative and laying these issues to rest.
Ok, this is a bit off-topic.
I'll grant you, Rushdie probably sold a lot of books because of the fatwah. On the other hand, he was forced to live in seclusion, couldn't go anywhere without body-guards, watched his marriage break up, etc. He's often stated that if it was merely to sell books, it "wasn't worth it."
Personally, I heard about "The Satanic Verses" before the fatwah, and had it on my reading list (though I didn't buy a copy 'til it was in paperback). I loved it and think it's great. Yes, some of it is "improbable," there is a whole genre called magic realism that deals in the improbable.
Moreover, his creditials were established well before "Verses." His novel "Midnight's Children" won Britian's premiere literary award, The Booker Prize, in 1981, seven years before "Verses" was published.
Yes, yes, I suppose some people with nothing better to do might walk around sputtering incoherently and mentioning "libel" and "slander" now and then. On the other hand, more sensible minds will simply ignore Ken Brown and his "institute", knowing that it is common knowledge that he is just another kind of high-priced prostitute. He provides a service kind of like those people who will write college papers and thesis on whatever subject you tell them. No news here, move along...
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Heh. Personally, I have to give him this one. The book is his manifesto on open source software. It's not like the discussion was about the poor quality of judging at last years Ninepins World Championship Tournament (damn those Norwegian judges!).
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
What baffles me is why Microsoft doesn't compete on price. A $49.95 full copy of Windows would fly out the door. People would upgrade yearly. Piracy would drop. Microsoft marketshare would be bolstered. Hard to believe how greedy Bill Gates really is. Although, hardware has never been cheaper, MS software keeps going up and up in price.
Dude, the audience for this book is not comprised of IT workers, CTO's or CEO's, or even the general public. It's for the policy wonks in Washington. The book is nothing more than pure unadulterated lobbying shit. Just like ADTI's "junk science" report that is so often quoted by the tobacco industry and goofball libertarians.
How is parent interesting?
It's a slam at ESR that at least in this case is unjustified.
ESR's response to the report was reasonable and logical, and his boasts about himself weren't boasts as much as they were supports of his credibility to make the statements about the report he made.
His comment about publishing his change logs is very valid. With a complete, open audit trail, the ethics of OSS developers is usually on display for the world. This is in great contrast to proprietary software, which just based on lawsuits alone we can estimate has frequent theft of code from others.
His statement about being able to write it himself is reasonable. I'm no rocket ship (to quote Butthead), but even I could write a kernel if I had the drive. Using Tanenbaum's own books on computer architecture, as well as other books and examples. It's not magic. The magic comes much later in the tuning and improvement. Even then, that magic is really just very smart people getting involved.
On top of all that, parent poster personally has zero credibility ( Anonymous Coward ).
.sigs are for post^Hers.
First off, it's libel when it's printed, not slander. (Although if, for instance, Brown were to spout his nonsense on a talk show, I don't know whether it would be libel or slander. Probably the latter.) Second, to win a libel case you have to prove damages, and you have to prove that the information was both false and malicious.
In this case, is it false? Yes. Malicious? That's harder to prove, but could be. Damages? There's the rub. Unless this work damages Linus somehow -- he gets thrown in prison because of allegations in the book, or loses his job (which may I remind you is with a group that is undoubtedly aware of Brown's blatant disregard for the truth), neither of which is likely -- damages would be pretty hard to prove. Especially if sales and usage of Linux continue to climb.
So I think the best course of action is just to refute the FUD everywhere it rears its pointed little head. If Linus were to sue for libel the most likely result would be to make two sets of lawyers richer.
Of course I could be wrong. John Henry Faulk sued AWARE for libel and effectively ended blacklisting in this country. Something similar might come out of a lawsuit against AdTI, but really only Linus could decide if it's worth the effort.
Someone you trust is one of us.
You gotta love ADTI's assertion that one person couldn't possibly write and OS. When I was working in a university computing services group - our CS students all had to write their own (however simple) OS as part of an Operating Systems course. They had to do so in order to graduate.
Of course one man can write an OS. Then, afterwards, thousands of volunteers worldwide can make it a GOOD os.
\Drew National Data Director, John Edwards for President