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.

Comments

First

[Anonymous Coward]

Psot!

slashdotted alread? mirror please

[tsadi]

can't load http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/codecomparison/. seems to have been slashdotted already.

mirror please, anyone?

ESR contradicts himself

[Malc]

Is it me, or did ESR contradict himself early on? First he says massive theft is rare and next to impossible... then he casually goes on to accuse MSFT of swiping the BSD code for their TCP/IP stack. One of the rare occurances perhaps, or is he insinuating that commercial companies do it all the time?

The mail at Andy's page

[Anonymous Coward]

A message I received from Alexey Toptygin "Around the middle of April, I was contacted by a friend of mine who asked me if I wanted to do some code analysis on a consultancy basis for his boss, Ken Brown. I ended up doing about 10 hours of work, comparing early versions of Linux and Minix, looking for copied code. My results are here. To summarize, my analysis found no evidence whatsoever that any code was copied one way or the other. (I realize that Minix predates Linux, but I did the comparison bidirectionally for the sake of objectivity). While I was working on this in my spare time, Ken kept pestering me to hurry up and finish. He told me he had a paper awaiting publication, and that my analysis was the las bit of data he needed. I sent the final results (which are, exactly as given to Ken Brown, at the above URL) to him on May 17th. When I called him to ask if he had any questions about the analysis methods or results, and to ask if he would like to have it repeated with other source comparison tools, I was in for a bit of a shock. Apparently, Ken was expecting me to find gobs of copied source code. He spent most of the conversation trying to convince me that I must have made a mistake, since it was clearly impossible for one person to write an OS and 'code theft' had to have occured. So, I guess what I want to say is, pay no attention to this man; to the best of my knowledge he is talking out of his ass. I apologise for any inconvenience I may have caused you by participating (however indirectly) in Ken's pet project. Please feel free to reproduce this email and the contents of my analysis webpage." --Alexey Toptygin

Re:Does anybody else find ESR's writing style odd?

[Nosf3ratu]

Clearly, you did not read the entire article...if you would have read it, you would have noticed:

P.S.: Some readers have pointed out that my lanuage above was unclear in one respect. It is perfectly legal for Microsoft to have lifted code from BSD. But we only know about this because the way TCP/IP implementations respond to certain odd packet types is underspecified in the standard, and it is possible to build family trees of code derivation through behavioral analysis.

The point is this: Microsoft (legally) took BSD code, and the only way we know about it is through behavioural analysis. So how do we know commercial outfits haven't taken code illegally?

And to quote you: Yes, I think he should have taken a deep breath and counted to ten before replying :^)

Uh-huh. He definitely should have. Maybe you should have, too.