Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Stallman vs Ken Brown

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the throw-down-the-gloves dept.

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."

4 of 304 comments (clear)

  1. The whole point was to "clone" unix by katorga · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Samizdat? by psavo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    fucktard is a tenderhearted description
  3. Re:what MS funded "study" about Linux isn't FUD? by Peter+S.+Housel · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Astroturf de Tocqueville Institute by x1048576 · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.