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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."
"The actual words I used were quoted correctly, but [author Kenneth Brown] deliberately confuses his terms, like 'Linux.' He confuses the Linux kernel, which I had nothing to do with, and the GNU OS project, which I launched," said Stallman, who characterized such mistakes as "deliberate."M
I believe that Brown is probably far more knowledgeable about the differentiation between the kernel and the GNU project but for the masses it is certainly not something that most people know or care to know.
Perhaps Stallman doesn't realize that it isn't a single person making the confusion it's everyone. The whole GNU/Linux bullshit doesn't help a bit either. Anyone not in the know is going to say, hmm, GNU/Linux, all one thing.
It was certainly FUD but what MS funded "study" isn't?
Don't attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
Is there any chance Brown will just scrap this misbegotten report? When you look at the critiques that have already been made, there's no way he can possibly revise the report to accommodate them. Maybe he should just not publish the report.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
...can be found here (it's inlined in the article). Not bad, for RMS. He kinda looks Jedi-ish. Or like a philosophical gnu ;)
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Nice title for the book... So the author's implication is that open source is also communist?
Yeah, because doing something for the betterment of society without wanting to get rich off of it is just un-American...
Mr. Brown is up for the ride of his life (probably the last one as I can't imagine anyone taking him seriously after his paper gets out)
What are the odds that the paper will in fact be published? Couldn't this whole exercise just be a means of stirring up the pot? I can easily imagine a quiet statement along the lines of "the article was not published due to $RANDOM_REASON" coming out in the near future. But the FUD and talk remain fresh in the minds of the public.
(wraps tin-foil tighter)
Ken Brown will make lots of money from this book because of the massive free publicity.
I doubt it. It's being published through Booksurge.com, a vanity publisher.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
A. Tanenbaum has recently posted an email he received. Interesting stuff, in which you'll discover the way K. Brown does his analysis.
stuff here
blah
I wish that Linus, Tannenbaum and the whole damn FSF crew would finally go see a lawyer and sue these people for libel. Given that both Tannenbaum and Linus agree on this point they might even be able to subpoena Alexis de Fuckville's mail correspendence with repsect to Microsoft.
I pray for this, in all honesty.
The point RMS is trying to make is that Linus did not write an operating system, but only a kernel. This distiction is important and shows that Brown is jumping to conclusions on the basis of false assumptions.
To me, the really boggling thing is that Ken Brown says that Linux must have been stolen from Minix because one man couldn't do it, yet overlooks the fact that Minix was a one man show.
I'm sorry but Ken Brown is a dirtbag.