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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.
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
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