Stallman vs Ken Brown

An anonymous reader writes "Richard Stallman has become the latest person to speak-out about Ken Brown's "independent" study of Linux, which accuses it of being a Minix/Unix rip-off. Stallman says Brown deliberately confused the Linux kernel vs the GNU project, although I suspect Brown simply didn't know enough to be able to differentiate between the two."

Comments

The whole point was to "clone" unix

[katorga]

What is the big deal here? From my reading of the history of Linux and the statements of Torvalds, the entire point of linux was to reverse engineer Unix so that Torvalds could have an affordable personal unix.

That was also the point behind the development of Minix as well.

Bear in mind that at the time Unix licenses cost many thousands of dollars.

Re:Samizdat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? "Samizdat" was anti-Soviet, not anti-American.

Re:Samizdat?

[psavo]

get lost, ignoramus.

samizdat means 'selfpublishing', having nothing to do with communism. It was 'invented' in a communist country, but it's as well employed everywhere where an author can't get published.

Re:As flattering a photo of RMS as there'll ever b

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this may be the Original picture source.

He definitely cleans up better than I thought.

Re:what MS funded "study" about Linux isn't FUD?

[Peter S. Housel]

It uses a mix of original code and various public-domain and open-source packages. When Minix was first released, BSD code was just beginning to be open-sourced. There weren't many GNU utilities available at the time, either, and most of them were (by design) too memory-hungry to fit into the 64K code+64K data space required by Minix 1.x.

Ken Brown's Intent

[Anonymous Coward]

I've exchanged email with Mr Brown. His reply gave me the impression that he set out with the intent to damage the Free software movement. If you want to get the words direct from the horses mouth (so to speak), his email address is on the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution website. He's listed as 'President' on their contacts page.

Re:More RMS Babble

[latroM]

Where is Hurd? Is it done? Is it usable enough for you to use it for your webserver?

It is: http://slashdot.org/articles/99/12/04/2319209.shtm l.

Frankly GNU has fallen from the Open Souce limelight. Open Office, Mozilla, Linux, and The Gimp have all taken the spotlight away from GNU. Why? Because they are useful.

GNU hasn't ever been a part of Open Source because it belongs to the Free Software Movement which is other completely differenct movement with different goals than the OS movement. Their goal isn't to be popular, it is to be Free (quoting RMS):

The fundamental difference between the two movements is in their values, their ways of looking at the world. For the Open Source movement, the issue of whether software should be open source is a practical question, not an ethical one. As one person put it, ``Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.'' For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution.

No matter how much you rant about GNU's invisibility keep in mind that the basic building blocks of the GNU/Linux OS are GNU.

Astroturf de Tocqueville Institute

[x1048576]

As part of the Tobacco Settlement Agreement Philip Morris (PM) agreed to release millions of documents about their operations. These detail how ADTI was hired by PM to conduct a public relations campaign against the Clinton health plan in 1994. ADTI provided PM with regular progress reports to prove that PM was getting value for its money, so they also let us see how these campaigns are conducted.

The Clinton plan included an increase in taxes on cigarettes from 24c per pack to 99c. Understandably, PM was not in favour of this, so a Philip Morris executive suggested an astroturf campaign, writing to one of his people:

Having just read the Washington Post with a series of provocative articles about Canada cutting taxes, CBO estimating higher costs AND job loss from the Clinton plan and then our old favourite, former president current homebuilder, Jimmy Carter explaining why higher taxes will help tobacco farmers, it occurred to me that we ought to turn a few of our better letter writers loose to blitz the targeted states with letters to the editor about Clinton, Carter and Canada...

If you want some astroturfing done, who you gonna call? The Alexis de Tocqueville Institute:

David N & I think the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute is perfect for this kind of thing. We are working with them on a proposal.

And here is their proposal:

Our three key executives, Cesar Conda, Bruce Bartlett and myself, will run this campaign and we will devote the full energies of our operation and its consultants to this task. We plan to activate our key Advisory Board Members, including Jack Kemp, Robert Kasten, Dick Armey, Michael Boskin and others to mount a public awareness campaign immediately (see enclosed list of Center on Regulation and Economic Growth participants).

As you can see from our press in recent months, we are in a position to deliver. We would like to request $60,000, or $30,000 a month, to implement this program.

And over the next two months ADTI ran a PR campaign against the Clinton plan. For the benefit of PM they documented all their activities. All the details are here.

Re:Open source accountabilit

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think commercial code is in any way clean, you have never worked on commercial code.

The code monkey is going to copy any code they have access to in order to get their job done.

I can guarantee you that plagarisim in commercial code is hundreds or thousands of times higher than in open-source. For the simple reason that it is hidden.

I'm posting anonymously because I have done it too, at two different companies, with code from an earlier employer. I have also written oss and I did NOT plagarize that.

Re:RMS says "I told you so!"

[Arker]

Honestly, the thing is, the poster is demonstrably wrong on that. Brown had spent quite a bit of time on several mailing lists, not to mention interviewing Stallman himself, and this distinction was explained to him slowly, clearly, and repeatedly. So he does know the difference, he just pretends not to because that's convenient for his FUD.

Re:Samizdat?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

And yet it's a Russian word popularized in the Soviet era. It's a meaning-neutral word with a non-neutral connotation.

Re:Typical Stallman

[Phong]

Linux did not have any Minux code in it. The early releases had to be compiled from another OS, typically Minix -- perhaps that is what you're remembering?

Linux 0.11 was the first release that was self-hosting (i.e. able to compile itself). There followed a 0.12 release and then 0.13 was released as version 0.95.