Ken Brown Responds to His Critics

An anonymous reader writes "Yes, I know it's getting boring by now, but the truth must be told... the latest Unix celebrity to come forward and criticise Ken Brown/ADTI is Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie. The gist is that Brown is claiming an 'extensive interview' with Ritchie but this was actually limited to a single email exchange and a follow-up call from one of Brown's lackeys checking one or two facts." Reader markrages writes "Ken Brown (of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution) replies to his critics. Dr. Tanenbaum is an 'animated, but tense individual about the topic of rights and attribution'. The GNU/Linux naming issue also makes an appearance."

Comments

Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[bjarvis354]

Comparing the MINIX kernel to the Linux kernel is like comparing a microkernel to a monolithic one...Hey wait a minute!

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[zurab]

Just shows the guy knows nothing about the subject matter, he is just creating some fictional story in his own little world:

Is it likely that a student (Linus Torvalds) with no operating systems experience, a non-Unix licensee, without any use of Minix or Unix source code, could build a functioning kernel in six months -- whereas it took you (Tanenbaum) three years to build Minix?

I think he already replied to that by saying "yes." Since Minix was worked only part-time during those 3 years. And creating a simple kernel for limited hardware and limited functionality is not that hard of a task as it's made out to be in this case.

Another problem with Tanenbaum's logic is that he only presents examples of people that were Unix licensees ...

Tanenbaum was not a Unix licensee and he told you the task was possible to accomplish in few months if he had devoted more time to it.

Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes -- certainly not a line of source code to borrow from, or to be tempted to borrow from.

Making stuff up eh? When you have no logical argument to make, just use your creativity. I am assuming Linus had programming books, knowledge and education, a compiler, and other tools, including an existing OS - Minix. Not to say that he copied code from Minix, as Tanenbaum already showed.

The GNU team contributed their GCC compiler, a complicated product with over 110,000 lines of code to the Linux project. Without the compiler, it is very likely that the Linux project would not have succeeded. The GNU team only asked that the product be called GNU/Linux, a very simple request for helping to make him famous. But Torvalds silently, but deliberately let the naming idea die.

Eh? Where do you begin? "Contributed" to who - Linus? Kernel called GNU/Linux? I don't recall reading anywhere anyone insisting the kernel should be called GNU/Linux. Surely, the guy knows nothing about the subject matter he is trying so hard to talk about.

How much 'inspiration' did Linus get from Minix? AdTI argues clearly enough to credit the Prentice Hall product. Not in conversation either, but within the copyright and/or the credits files of the kernel. Quite noticeably, however, there is not one acknowledgement of Minix anywhere in the Linux kernel.

Because Linus didn't copy any code from Minix. How many times does this guy have to be told, and by how many people? Or maybe he wants to come in and specify files and line numbers like SCO did? Oh wait a minute...

I also found quotes taken out of context quite amusing:

Tanenbaum insists that we are wrong to bring any of this up, but ironically, he comments on his site, "but Linus' sloppiness about attribution is no reason to assert that Linus didn't write Linux(8)."

Linus decided he was not the inventor of Linux commenting in a ZDNet story, "I'd agree that 'inventor' is not necessarily the right word(9)"

And finally, a reply to:

Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector.

Err... replace "Linux" with "competition" - because competition in general is also very bad - it has a deleterious effect and is depreciating the value of the products and services that our patriotic abusive monopolists provide to masses, right? Idiot! Why don't we ask HP (a Unix licensee, ironically) how "deleterious" Linux has been for them last year. Or maybe you want to try IBM, another Unix licensee?

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[CoolToddHunter]

Well reasoned, but I have a devil's advocate question.

Another problem with Tanenbaum's logic is that he only presents examples of people that were Unix licensees ...

Tanenbaum was not a Unix licensee and he told you the task was possible to accomplish in few months if he had devoted more time to it.

Ken Brown asserts that Tanenbaum had the Lions notes (illegal Unix copy), so the fact that he wasn't a Unix licensee should be irrelevant. Given that, how would you now respond to Brown's statement?

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[pfleming]

My favorite guote of all:
However, building a product that starts with the accomplishment of others and announcing it as completely your own work product, is not invention, nor is it innovation. Innovation can only work properly if innovators properly credit the work of others, especially if the innovator has decided to introduce the product into the marketplace for commercial gain.
So are they saying that Bill Gates has a problem?

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Tachys]

Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes -- certainly not a line of source code to borrow from, or to be tempted to borrow from.

He has a point there, Linus would to have at least copy from the first kernel which was created by God.

What you think a bunch a computer scientists created a kernel without ever seeing a kernel before? That is of course impossible.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Red Alastor]

By pointing to the fact that Brown made no distinction between Linux being a monolithic kernel and Minix being a Microkernel. Linus can't have copied Minix because of this fact as Tananbaum pointed out. If the Lions book was a monolithic kernel, Linus could have copied from it if he had it but that would mean that Tanenbaum is sure to have written his from scratch. Or vice-versa if the Lions book is about a microkernel. Either way, if one was able to do it from scratch, why not the other ?

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mr Brown has not the foggiest, vaguest clue about the essence of the human creative process.

When we create something "new", we are not forced to return to the first glimmerings of conciousness and higher cognitive function. Even a popular work like James Burkes "Connections" would tell him that *nothing* created by man gets created in a vacuum.

Furthermore, "standing on the shoulders of giants" is so utterly pervasive in science and engineering, and I can't believe that Mr. Brown doesn't understand this.

Clearly, Linus didn't start with a 200litre drum of refined silicon dioxide, and build himself a computer. He had tools. Like Minix, and a C compiler. And a keyboard, cpu, memory, CRT. And a place to live and work, and a regular supply of food and water. He likely took a shower once in awhile, and might even have been using electricity purchased from the power company, rather than cluttering his brain and wasting his energies repeteadly running magnets through
hastily-assembled coils of wire.

Clearly Linus stole the idea of his own existence from his parents, who, at least according to some, owe a great debt to some chimpanzees and a man called Charles Darwin.

Following Mr. Browns argumet, Linus can't reasonably have claimed to have invented anything, since the dependancy tree for his creative process (as described above) is actually staggering in scope.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes -- certainly not a line of source code to borrow from, or to be tempted to borrow from.

Hrm... so... basically, according to AdTI, if I sit down and write a Peer-to-peer program with copies of Kernighan & Richie's C Programming book and Steven's Unix Network Programming books in front of me, I'm somehow not writing code from scratch?

so... in the same logic, I'd be commiting plagiarism if I wrote an essay that used other books as references...

What kind of crack are these guys smoking? (cuz I want some...)

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[SpaceLifeForm]

I realize you were trying to be funny, but it should be noted that at some point, many, many years ago, say 40, a hand-written kernel was booted that was written in assembler. Just having a very simple kernel that could safely manage a filesystem that you could build upon was all it took. Obviously, today, you certainly could write a kernel much easier because your tools are so much better. Linus had it somewhere in between the real early kernels written in assember and the modern kernel of today when he started creating Linux.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[zurab]

Ken Brown asserts that Tanenbaum had the Lions notes (illegal Unix copy), so the fact that he wasn't a Unix licensee should be irrelevant. Given that, how would you now respond to Brown's statement?

People who know much more about this than I ever will have already answered this, so here is the summary.

First of all, I am not sure what the "Brown's statement" is. Is it that

- Linus used Lions' book to create his kernel; or
- Linus copied code from Minix into Linux?

The latter has already been put to rest by Alexey Toptygin's code comparison done for Ken Brown (previously reported on /.):

To summarize, my analysis found no evidence whatsoever that any code was copied one way or the other.

In Tanenbaum's own words:

Thus, of course, Linus didn't sit down in a vacuum and suddenly type in the Linux source code. He had my book, was running MINIX, and undoubtedly knew the history (since it is in my book). But the code was his. The proof of this is that he messed the design up. ...

The aforementioned code comparison proves there is no Minix code in Linux. So, what is the "Brown's statement" with regards to Minix? I mean - what else? Of course, Linus had and knew Minix, as Tanenbaum wrote:

I told him that MINIX had clearly had a huge influence on Linux in many ways, from the layout of the file system to the names in the source tree, but I didn't think Linus had used any of my code.

Is there anything wrong with taking filesystem layout and directory structure? No. Should Linus have attributed this to Minix (if he did take it from there)? Maybe. Is it wrong that he didn't do so? Absolutely not. Not only did Linus not copy any code from Minix, he didn't even take Minix' microkernel design and later flamewars should tell you what he really thought of that system.

As far as the Lions' book, this is what Tanenbaum wrote:

I don't think he could have copied UNIX because he didn't have access to the UNIX source code, except maybe John Lions' book, which is about an earlier version of UNIX that does not resemble Linux so much.

So, even if Linus had access to Lions' book, he did not actually take anything from it because Linux didn't actually resemble the earlier version of UNIX that was in that book. Ken Brown, is obviously free, like SCO is, to name the files and lines of code that he believe were "stolen" from earlier versions of UNIX and put into Linux' first release so he can have something factual rather than fictional.

So, what exactly is the "Brown's statement" is what I don't know. It's obvious by now that he doesn't have any proof to back his assertions up - how could Linus have written a kernel by himself in 6 months - it's all fiction in his created in his own mind; it's also obvious that he is misrepresenting many interviewees that he "extensively" interviewed, and all those interviewees that sounded off are ever so politely calling him a liar at best.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[fingusernames]

Assembler? Try binary (it's not that hard, we did it in school in the second or third year). And entered with switches on a front panel.

Larry

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[FatherBusa]

Yes. Obviously. Your counterattack is well informed and your reasoning is perfectly sound. Ken Brown is an idiot. He has not slightest idea what he's talking about. Amen, amen.

Now, could we please ignore this nonsense and start talking about something else? All we're doing is feeding the FUD by calling attention to it. If this blowhard wants to claim that Linux was written by a covert gang of CIA operatives with money from Al Queda, let him go ahead. There is absolutely, positively no way that any CTO faced with a decision about Linux migration is going to take advice from AdTI. There is also no way that SCO is going to enter this garbage into evidence and win their case with it. And certainly, there is not the slightest possibility of shock troops from the USPTO breaking down our doors and taking our laptops, because of Ken Brown's expert research.

It is really time to stop turning this guy's deluded ramblings into /. headlines.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Tony-A]

at some point, many, many years ago, say 40, a hand-written kernel was booted that was written in assembler.

Correct.
Not once.
Many times.
Most of 'em lost in the dust of history.

You haven't lived until you've keypunched EBCDIC machine language into an IPL deck.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Tony-A]

Ken Brown asserts that Tanenbaum had the Lions notes (illegal Unix copy)

Highly unlikely.
With the Lions book, read, understand, write UNIX. Many years.
Without the Lions book, understand, write LINUX. One year.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[ta bu shi da yu]

Yep, something I point out in my K5 diary where I respond to Ken Brown's response.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[squiggleslash]

I'm quite sure there was investigative journalism (good and crappy) before Ken Brown's book, and Brown was, at some point in his life, exposed to it (Fox News, judging from what's come out about his book.)

So I think it's absolutely absurd for Brown to argue he is the "author" of his own "book". Clearly he just copied from more original work, perhaps the Whitewater stories, or maybe he went further, back to the "journalist" who "exposed" the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Anonymous Coward]

> You haven't lived until you've keypunched EBCDIC
> machine language into an IPL deck.

That's correct, an IPL written in 80 bytes. Which had to read some subsequent cards from the deck containing the rest of the loader.

Let's see, that was about 1970.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I don't recall reading anywhere anyone insisting
> the kernel should be called GNU/Linux. Surely, the
> guy knows nothing about the subject matter he is
> trying so hard to talk about.

Actually, I don't think Ken Brown is completely wrong on this point, though it hardly matters, since he is wrong about so much else.

Richard Stallman has long pushed for the term "GNU/Linux", as discussed in his biography:

GNU/Linux chapter of Free As in Freedom

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[mpsmps]

Another problem with Tanenbaum's logic is that he only presents examples of people that were Unix licensees ...

This is false. I worked at Mark Williams. Mark Williams was definitely not a unix licensee. Dennis Ritchie has a nice account of his lawyer-driven visit to Mark Williams that failed to turn up any evidence of code appropriation.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[zurab]

Richard Stallman has long pushed for the term "GNU/Linux", as discussed in his biography

The term refers to the whole system, not just the kernel. If you are referring to the kernel only - it's called Linux; if you are referring to the kernel plus the collection of necessary GNU libraries, tools and utilities you are referring to GNU/Linux. That's an important distinction that Ken Brown does not seem to understand.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Tony-A]

"The GNU team contributed their GCC compiler, a complicated product with over 110,000 lines of code to the Linux project."

GNU team -- what is that? I'm sure there are several teams doing something with GNU software but I doubt the existence of any single entity known as the GNU team.

contributed -- How? When? By whom? It was available and it was used persuant to its licensing terms. There was no "contribution".

their -- Assumes an ownership contrary to the terms of the GPL. Like "You are breathing my air."

complicated -- He got one right!

product -- Again assumes an ownership contrary to the terms of the GPL.

to the Linux project. -- At the time gcc was first used, there was no "Linux" or "Linux project". If it had a name it was called something like FREAX IIRC.

"but Linus' sloppiness about attribution is no reason to assert that Linus didn't write Linux(8)."
Consider what is required for unsloppy attribution. Research and trace all ideas back to their original sources, and don't forget the minor Greek philosophers. Few if any actually measure up to that standard. It's also quite plausible that Linus reinvented almost everything without knowledge of or access to the previous inventions.
"I'd agree that 'inventor' is not necessarily the right word."
That's a bit like the sculptor who quipped that he just removed the stuff that wasn't the persona of the statue. Invention is done, but the overall process is more like discovery.

"How much 'inspiration' did Linus get from Minix?"
First, the fact that it exists. Second, that if he wants to play Unix on a 80386 he's gonna have to do it himself. The problem with copying from Minix is that anything copied brings a bunch of baggage along with itself. The wrong baggage. So it's easier to redo everything with the "right" baggage.

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Tony-A]

Dennis Ritchie in a posting to alt.folklore.computers
"... didn't allow us to look at their source.

I concluded two things:

First, that it was very hard to believe that Coherent and its basic
applications were not created without considerable study of the
OS code and details of its applications.

Second, that looking at various corners convinced me that I couldn't
find anything that was copied. It might have been that some parts were
written with our source nearby, but at least the effort had been
made to rewrite. If it came to it, I could never honestly testify
that my opinion was that what they generated was irreproducible from
the manual."

Re:Comparing Apples and Oranges.

[Anonymous Coward]

He likely took a shower once in awhile

Take it back! TAKE IT BACK!!

OMG.

[jhill]

A village is out there, crying, like baby jesus, because it's idiot ran away...please send him back.

Re:OMG.

[feargal]

Do you mind if I print a T-shirt for myself with that someday?

Re:OMG.

[jlaxson]

Put it on CafePress and i'll buy one, too.

Re:OMG.

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone knows how much it costs to go from Washington DC to Redmond?

Re:OMG.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dulles or Reagan?

Warning: 21-day advance purchase required for most fares. Many restrictions apply.

Re:OMG.

[Anonymous Coward]

because it's idiot ran away

"its".
No apostrophe.

These are the kinds of inaccuracies and outright falsehoods that my book fights against.
- Ken Brown

The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[byolinux]

GNU project sets out to create Free Software OS.

Various parts are already complete, a la X.

Kernel needed, as GNU project kernel not finished... ... along comes Linux kernel, under GPL.

GNU project could have just taken this as their official kernel, but they'd put too much work into Hurd to stop really, and Hurd is a better design, so they choose GNU/Linux, to offer credit to themselves and all the work they've done in creating a Free Software OS, but also to Linus Torvalds.

It's not X/GNU/Apache/MySQL/Linux/etc because non of those other things ever set out to make a Free Operating System, not even Linus.

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[Anonymous Coward]

But Linus maintains Linux, GNU doesn't. So he gets to pick the name. Which he has.

GNU maintains HURD, which has oh so many users.

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[Anonymous Coward]

But GNU also maintains much of the core system. And the part of Linux that Linus maintains (the kernel) is indeed called Linux. Why should Linus get to decide the naming of the entire operating system?

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[Nasarius]

He shouldn't. That's up to the people who package and/or sell the OS. Using "Linux" to refer to a UNIX-style system built with the Linux kernel, GNU tools, etc. has caught on. It may not be "proper", but it's certainly not illegal. In other words: who cares?

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[Brandybuck]

Various parts are already complete, a la X.

I'm sorry, but that should be "GNU/X". If X is a part of "The GNU System", then we have to give credit to GNU by calling it "GNU/X".

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[ron_ivi]

More importantly he owns the trademark, so in the worse case couldn't he tell people that GNU/Linux is just as bad trademark dilution as Lindows?

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[fatray]

Brown says that Linux should be called GNU/Linux because Linus used GCC. He goes on to say "Without the compiler, it is very likely that the Linux project would not have succeeded." This is implying to those who do not understand such things that Linux somehow illegitamately used GCC to make Linux. Linus was using GCC exactly as GNU (Richard M Stallman) intended. If GNU wanted any program compiled with GCC to be named GNU/{program name}, RMS would have written it into the license.

It may be true that Linux may not have succeeded without GCC. While Linux could have been written for other C compilers, GCC is the ubiquitous, free, standard.

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[Crazy Eight]

Why should Linus get to decide the naming of the entire operating system?

He doesn't and he never has. Indeed, IIRC, "Linux" was coined by the admin that was hosting the early code. Surely he embraced the word the way one might appreciate a flattering nickname, but he's never claimed to have written anything more than a kernel. It is the distributions and users who have opted to forgo the ungainly "GNU/Linux" (with the exception of Debian at least). Honestly now, if you heard that spoken without prior knowledge of the subject wouldn't you spell it "New Linucks" and wonder WTF? In any event, you don't hear kernel developers asking Stallman to call it Linux/glibc even though that library is useless without Torvald's kernel.

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[ignorant_newbie]

>... and Hurd is a better design...

"If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available"

True in 1992, _still_ true in 2004.

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[Tarantolato]

GNU project could have just taken this as their official kernel, but they'd put too much work into Hurd to stop really, and Hurd is a better design,

So much better that it's still completely unusable.

It's not X/GNU/Apache/MySQL/Linux/etc because non of those other things ever set out to make a Free Operating System, not even Linus.

"It's not GNU because GNU never succeeded in getting a usable system working." Or: "It should be X/Linux because GNU never set out to make a Free Desktop Environment." Same logic, equally asinine.

GNU/Linux, to offer credit to themselves and all the work they've done in creating a Free Software OS, but also to Linus Torvalds.

No. "They" "chose" (notice scare quotes) GNU/Linux:
1. After it had already been called "Linux" for some time; including in official GNU publications.
2. After "LiGNUx" flopped.
3. After it had become abundantly clear that Hurd was going fucking nowhere.

The "GNU/Linux" construction has become a tolerable one. One might argue that it is more just. But any argument that it is the one and only proper way to refer to the system in question is just completely fucking off the wall.

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[latroM]

So much better that it's still completely unusable.

Actually the Hurd on GNU Mach works well today and there is even a debian distribution built around it. They are moving to the l4 microkernel (which sucks less than Mach does) at the moment. "It's not GNU because GNU never succeeded in getting a usable system working." Or: "It should be X/Linux because GNU never set out to make a Free Desktop Environment." Same logic, equally asinine.

GNU managed to create a working, usable system which you are using on your Linux kernel. They had the idea, they had all the user level stuff and with linux that was an usable operating system.

But any argument that it is the one and only proper way to refer to the system in question is just completely fucking off the wall.

Stallman doesn't insist that you call the system GNU/Linux, he only suggests it because it doesn't blur history like Linux for the whole OS does. It causes people to believe that everything began when Torvalds released the kernel. I had that belief couple of years ago so I know what I am talking about.

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[Anonymous Coward]

wouldn't you spell it "New Linucks"

No, because it's pronounced "guh-NEW".
I might spell it "gunoo linnuks" or something like that.

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[Crazy Eight]

No, because it's pronounced "guh-NEW".

Whoops! My bad. As Ed McMahon used to say, "You are correct sir." It's too bad that makes the whole thing even worse.

Re:The GNU/Linux naming issue, as I see it.

[Anonymous Coward]

X is not part of GNU

Embedded systems....

[kidgenius]

Does he not realize that Linux runs on embedded systems. He makes a comment that:
"Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well." Let's see....PDA's, routers, cell phones, dvd players....yup, they all run Linux, and I don't see the value of these pieces of hardware spiraling downwards. The "cost" may drop, but the "value" could stay the same, or increase due to the possibly increased functionality (among other things) that running Linux on these devices allows.

Re:Embedded systems....

[The Lynxpro]

"Let's see....PDA's, routers, cell phones, dvd players....yup, they all run Linux, and I don't see the value of these pieces of hardware spiraling downwards."

Consider the source (and I don't mean code). That foundation receives monies from Microsoft. You bring up the PDA market. Both Microsoft and PalmOne receive $10 in royalties for the use of their operating systems (PocketPC and PalmOS) and intellectual property per licensed machine sold. Linux does have the potential of degrading those royalties down to nothing. First, licensees will pressure M$ and PalmOne into lowering their payments by using the "we can use Linux for free" argument. It could be argued that eventually, this means the PocketPC and PalmOS licenses will go down to $1 or less per machine sold. Microsoft would wave the licensing fee just to save face against Linux, but that would cripple PalmSource completely.

Re:Embedded systems....

[kidgenius]

You make a good point, but I never said cost couldn't drop, I merely said value, and there is a big difference between the two.

Re:Embedded systems....

[chad9023]

Obviously he's never heard of BusyBox, or seen the list of products which run it. Or the list of products which run it without giving it credit. While some companies certainly seem to enjoy using F/OSS and giving credit where credit is due, others seem to have no problem ripping off the work others have done, atleast when they don't think they'll get caught.

A good point was made on GrokLaw the other day: it's easy for commercial companies to make sure that none of their code has made it's way into F/OSS, but it's monumently harder for members of the open source community to make sure none of their code is being misused in commercial software and/or products.

Re:Embedded systems....

[The Lynxpro]

"You make a good point, but I never said cost couldn't drop, I merely said value, and there is a big difference between the two."

True. I wasn't taking issue with what you said; I was merely twisting Brown's argument into fitting into the equation. Adding Linux to a product doesn't detract from the value of the device to the consumer (it can definitely be argued that it adds value due to the code's strength), but it certainly devalues proprietary operating system software licenses. :)

Re:Embedded systems....

[meburke]

This (Ken Brown's portion) is actually a semantics-challenged statement that arrives at good economics: It makes total sense that as the cost of producing/reproducing human effort is reduced, then a competitive market will reduce the cost of the product to the consumer. I remember when I could make a pretty good living selling a couple of Vector Graphics Z-80/S-100 systems each week. The margins were 50% or higher and we were able to charge a reasonable amount for consulting and programming. Within a few years, the component costs, OS costs and expectations had reduced margins to about 15% on systems costing only 1/10 as much for the same features. It makes total sense that consumers would be interested in almost any method to to reduce their incremental cost, but we had to do about 30 times the business to make the same amount of money. In addition, the maintenance costs on proprietary methods and products is very good for the proprietor, but a real annoyance for the end user and consumer. People seem to resent being bent over a barrel while they are trying to accomplish their own goals. Lastly, the cost of reproducing a solution is much less than the cost of initially deriving a solution. One thing I like about producing software solutions is: NO INVENTORY! It's all brainsweat, and the distribution of the solution is likely to be jsut as valuable to the last person who uses it as to the first person, even though the cost of distribution is so much less.

Re:Embedded systems....

[dubious9]

Yeah, he is using straw man arugment. While challening the validity of linux with quotes like

he reality is that, noone, including Linus Torvalds, can ever guarantee that code in the Linux kernel is free of counter ownership, or attribution claims.

When in reality noone can ever be absolutely sure, OSS or proprietary, the validity of source code who has more than one writer. This is a common theme of anti-Linux writers: Desribe a weakness that Linux has (as the defacto-OSS model) that really isn't a weakness, or that it effects all software.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised they haven't thought of another avenue of attack. And then there is inflamatory sentences like this:

Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property?

Um... the GPL is ALL about IP. It has protections and safegaurds. It doesn't even have to be free! Contemp for IP? Not Linus, RMS maybe, but it's still a longshot.

Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?

As I said before trust applies to everybody who writes code. You have to trust your employees not to steal GLP'ed code too. Given that most software written is proprietary I'd say that that is a MUCH more likely propositition than masive amounts of unowned IP getting into Linux.

Re:Embedded systems....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. These very corporations that are "suffering" because of decreased value of proprietary software are using Linux for their own products.

There's a reason that guys like Bill Gates are among the richest in the world; their prices are overinflated and the products have an unrealistic value. Why is it impossible for thousands of coders, who devote their own time to writing code that benefits us all, to develop something like Linux? In addition, why is it not plausible that Linus wrote his "invention" on his own? Has this hack (Brown) ever seen the early Linux kernels? *ICK!* It wasn't even close to being a usable UNIX-like operating system.

It doesn't really matter anyway. The Minix and Linux source codes are all there. The BSD source codes are all there. Brown writes as if we have something to hide... Guess what? We don't. Look at SCO. What evidence have they provided? They're slowly fading away into nothingness. Even with the code there, they have yet to provide solid proof (and it's very doubtful that they will).

Who doesn't like open source? Well, essentially the Microsofts and the Symantecs of the world are the only ones that really dislike it. It makes them and their products virtually obsolete. I can't see how the IT industry couldn't do without both of those companies, frankly.

Ken Brown makes it very obvious that he's simply cashing in on the latest Microsoft FUD-attempt. I don't know how anyone would take him seriously, frankly, with writing like that. Most high school thesis papers are written better than this shit.

"Not the sharpest knife in the drawer," indeed.

Re:Embedded systems....

[horza]

"Does he not realize that Linux runs on embedded systems. He makes a comment that:
"Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well." Let's see....PDA's, routers, cell phones, dvd players....yup, they all run Linux, and I don't see the value of these pieces of hardware spiraling downwards."

Making firmware Open Source? What hardware manufacturer would do that?

Phillip.

Re:Embedded systems....

[eggboard]

Yeah, Cisco's "losing" all this money through its Linksys division using Linux to run its wireless routers. I'd love to "lose" as much money making embedded systems like Linksys.

Re:Embedded systems....

[13Echo]

This is true, to some degree - but look at products like the QTopia desktop interface. I don't really see Trolltech hurting right now, and QTopia is a pretty good product (look at the Zaurus).

Outside of the PDA - Companies like Opera use QT (commercial) for making their browser products.

Open source (especially free software and dual-license) can really benefit the innovative companies that do it right. Right now, that completely goes against Microsoft's traditional model... It scares the hell out of companies like that, because they no longer have the same level of control.

Re:Embedded systems....

[soloport]

I like this thin-minded quote, "For us to accept Tnenbaum's argument, Linus Torvalds at 21, with one year of C programming, was Doug Comer, an accomplished computer scientist, or smarter than the Coherent team, and of course a better programmer than the good professor too."

Let's see:
Edison started inventing at age 12
Alexander Graham Bell started inventing at age 18
Chester Greenwood applied for his first pattent at age 17
Blaise Pascal invented the mechanical adding machine at age 19
Philo Farnsworth invented the television at age 14
Margaret Knight invented the modern loom at age 12

Of course each of these individuals stole their ideas from others (they must have, given their age) and were able to bring their inventions to market without the aid of a single, solitary other person -- much like the story of Linux.

Re:Embedded systems....

[Anonymous Coward]

he reality is that, noone, including Linus Torvalds, can ever guarantee that code in the Linux kernel is free of counter ownership, or attribution claims.

I'd like to see him guarantee that nobody will claim to have written his report. It's trivial to say "hey, I wrote that!" A five year old could do it.

Re:Embedded systems....

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes I think that was the idea...

Re:Embedded systems....

[dekeji]

Microsoft would wave the licensing fee just to save face against Linux, but that would cripple PalmSource completely.

Yes, and so what? Why should Palm continue to make so much money on their software licenses? Competition and better production methods drive down prices in all markets. In the case of software, prices happen to be driven down to zero--nothing unusual about it. The only question is why it's taking so long.

And in the case of Palm in particular, it's not like the company is investing a lot of money in research--their rate of software innovation is glacial, and they are nearly invisible at scientific conferences. Microsoft makes a far bigger investment in research (both absolute and relative) than Palm.

Re:Embedded systems....

[Master of Transhuman]

Ah, but a five year old would have better sense than to claim he wrote it.

Only Brown is venal and stupid enough to write this claptrap.

Oh, wait, I forgot about Darl...

Re:Embedded systems....

[bruthasj]

I like this comment. Is the observation that if the margins and cost of product are driven down, that means the market could actually grow for the product given a good marketing approach and consumer demand, a correct assumption? And would it therefore improve the possibility of doing 30 times the business.

thanks.

Re:Embedded systems....

[nilram]

Let's not forget that brilliant 19 year old who wrote the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 88, Bill Gates.

Gates must have just sat down and started dumping bits in. He couldn't have had a list of opcodes or even seen a BASIC interpreter before otherwise that would be stealing.

How long did this project take Gates anyway? I believe it was less than a year.

Re:Embedded systems....

[Anonymous Coward]

His whole "value" argument is very software company (read: MS) centric. He claims that hybrid (read: GPL) software destroys the value of software and IP in general. Since his anti-GPL stuff has been destroyed here before, lets just look at the value thing.

GPL software, like any software other than their own, can decrease the value of some IP, for the company that created it. This is called competition. GM making cars decreases the value of Ford's cars, too. They have curves in microeconomics showing this trend. What it doesn't do is decrease the value of any software to the consumer, who constitute 99.9% of the population. What he's saying, essentially, is that GPL software creates competition, which makes life harder for other software developers, because they have to, you know, compete.

(I think part of the problem is that too many businessmen can't even comprehend that someone would be in the market without trying to rape the consumer, or even to maximize their profit. The community-growth model is simply beyond their comprehension, and if they do comprehend, they hate it because it won't make them richer than 'the masses'. see: prisoner's dilemma)

He says that this report was put out to warn our government of the dangers of the GPL. (Sorry, of "hybrid code"). I don't own a tin foil hat, but I don't doubt that this asshole is eating dinner with Mr. Gates or Mr. McBride this week. Anyway, I think the FSF needs to publish something pointing out the gaping flaws in his report, so that our representatives have two papers to ignore.

Re:Embedded systems....

[chris_sawtell]

You forget that Louis Braille invented his encoding of the alphabet as dots at the age of 12.
His was a true invention, there was no prior art whatsoever.

Re:Embedded systems....

[dubl-u]

The "cost" may drop, but the "value" could stay the same, or increase due to the possibly increased functionality (among other things) that running Linux on these devices allows.

That's spot on. I can't believe that he doesn't understand basic economics.

By his logic, the massive drop in prices for long distance phone calls over the decades must be really bad for the economy. And Moore's Law must be decimating the computer industry.

Given how much money Microsoft has, it would be nice if they bribed somebody smart to tell lies about Linux; this drooler isn't even a challenge. I hope they got a good deal.

Re:Embedded systems....

[Bazzargh]

Not to mention that Ken Thompson was just 26 when he started on 'Unics'. (ken born 1943, unix born 1969)

Re:Embedded systems....

[zcat_NZ]

" No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system."
- Bill Gates, from "Programmers at Work" by Microsoft Press.

You reading this, Mr Brown?

Re:Embedded systems....

[The Lynxpro]

"And in the case of Palm in particular, it's not like the company is investing a lot of money in research--their rate of software innovation is glacial, and they are nearly invisible at scientific conferences. Microsoft makes a far bigger investment in research (both absolute and relative) than Palm."

Considering Microsoft has $60 billion in the bank that is all due to ill gotten gains, they should be the most innovative company on the planet. At this point, Windows should be more secure than any Unix or Linux distribution, it should look better than OS X, and it should have voice recognition already. But it doesn't have any of those things I just mentioned. How much money does PalmSource have in comparison? Not much. Apples and oranges.

Re:Embedded systems....

[Bobzibub]

He implicitly understands basic economics but he just represents the producer, not the consumer.
For instance, he states:

Noone can ever truly accrue any value from owning hybrid source software, because everybody (and anybody) has the rights to every line of improvement in it.

Consider the "Producer's Surplus" and the Consumer's Surplus nicely defined here:
google cache:
http://216.239.53.104/search?q=cache:tf2fN iEpLrkJ: www.sci.wsu.edu/math/Lessons/SupplyAndDemand/solut ionSetUp.html+&hl=en
original:
http://www.sci.ws u.edu/math/Lessons/SupplyAndDeman d/solutionSetUp.html

The shaded areas represents benefit of a market to either the consumers or the producers. Now imagine what effect that the supply curve for OSS (f(x) = 0 ) would have on the graphs -- the producer's surplus is now zero, and the consumer's surplus is the area under the whole demand curve. The net benefit is a much bigger triangle, or a very large net benefit to society as a whole.

My question to Mr. Brown would be: Given that people (and even governments) are freely willing to freely licence their creations and work under a GPL like licence, does this not benefit consumers? Furthermore, when releasing products through the GPL (in economic terms, SupplyCurve(x)=0 ) is the substantial net benefit to all of society not worth the lesser loss to IP renters?
-b

Re:Embedded systems....

[LaCosaNostradamus]

When lawyers have no evidence to work with, they attack or defend on the basis of reputation, to support or remove suspicion and doubt.

Brown's tactics show this clearly. He is trying to raise the doubt about Linux's development to (he hopes) "reasonable" levels.

This is not a bad tactic, considering how things like juries are swayed by the doubt factor. Fortunately for us Linuxheads, this tactic is easy to deal with, but you have to be patient. At some point, when the spinmaster has spent his wad trying to settle the appropriate level of doubt, you step in and point out that there simply is no evidence to justify turning doubt into action.

Although the spinmaster Brown considers it unlikely that Mr Torvalds created the Linux kernal at such a young age, it is still what happened since there's no other evidence to the contrary. (Note to SCO: Look up the word "evidence" in the dictionary. Thanks.)

Re:Embedded systems....

[Tony-A]

if the margins and cost of product are driven down, that means the market could actually grow for the product

That is what has happened.
Very early mainframes. Somebody in a position to know (Chairman of IBM?) claimed there was a world market for at most 5 of them.

When the VALUE exceeds the COST, the market grows. Part gradually, part in fits and starts.

Equilibrium is somewhere around marginal value equals marginal cost.
Sounds simple until you look at "whose" value and "whose" cost.

Re:Embedded systems....

[meburke]

I think that's a fair assumption. Things will change. When I sold the first Apple ii's and Commodore Pet systems, margins were typically 33% to 50% and it stayed that way for a number of years. A customer spending $50,000 on a computer solution would get about 5 desktop systems and $25,000 worth of consulting and support. (Support contracts were an essential part of the sale.) Now a consumer would get 50 or more desktop systems and be offended if the support wasn't free for the first year. The installation and configuration may still be a separate item. I know people who are basically selling the system at cost and charging for the consulting. Unless you work in a fast-moving retail environment, the comissions you can make on hardware won't support you. But for the consumer it's great! OfficeMax delivers a few systems, the secretary puts them together using large, comic-bokk type diagrams, and any additional software is almost self-loading and configuring. Sometimes it's harder to learn the software than to install it. (Ask any first-time MS Outlook user!) Being able to order and download products from the Web has started to even out the value for the seller. I'm looking forward to practical nanotechnology: I'll just post my system solutions on a web page and the customer can download it from there using a phone.

USPTO respected?

[TwistedSquare]

The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency

Says the article... I'm sure a few round here would disagree.

Re:USPTO respected?

[Compholio]

It's more like internationally laughed at for approving anything that shows up on its doorstep and not even checking its own database for conflicts.

Re:USPTO respected?

[bstone]

The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency

And the United States Copyright Office is also an internationally respected agency, so when the "Star Registry" places a copy of their book there, it immediately gives you ownership to the "star" they named after you.

Right?

Re:USPTO respected?

[ValentineMSmith]

The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency

Says the article... I'm sure a few round here would disagree.

Well, I don't disagree that the United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

I'm a little iffy on the "...internationally respected agency..." part, though

Re:USPTO respected?

[ron_ivi]

This kind of "us vs them" mentality will make Microsoft and the Alex De Tokingvile guy win.

Simply bashing the system is not going to make the system respect Linux any more. It plays right in the hands of Brown's claim that the open source community has no respect for intellectual property.

It'd be far more constructive to help educate the patent office than to simply make fun of them. I suspect they want to learn, and if all we do is make jokes, and the Alex the Tweakerville guys give them well written policy papers, guess who they'll learn from.

Re:USPTO respected?

[Talking Toaster]

Don't be so sure. I had an epiphany yesterday after reading this article on the BBC website yesterday.

The situation probably is that most people don't know and don't care about Intelectual Property. I once got into an argument with a co-worker over the difference between copyright and trademark, and her argument was basically "What's the difference."

When most people don't understand what patents are for, and what they are, and are not supposed to protect, and when and when not they should be granted, when they don't know and don't care is it any wonder that our patent system is in such a mess?

Yes, a few around here will disagree, but outside the computer geeks and patent lawyers most people are too willfully ignorant to respect or disrespect the USPTO. Never underestimate the power of stupidity. It is the most powerful force in the universe. If only we could build a car that ran on the stuff, the world might be a better place. Either that or we'd have lots of car accidents.

Re:USPTO respected?

[Delos]

Kind of like /. ;-)

Re:USPTO respected?

[StenD]

OK, is the fact that the Federal Trade Commission is expressing skepticism that the USPTO is properly reviewing patent applications more credible?

Re:USPTO respected?

[mikeee]

f1rst p4t3nt!

Re:USPTO respected?

[MasonMcD]

Hey, maybe the USPO could have a moderation/meta-moderation system like /.

So we could have comments like "hey, this patent is a dupe. Check June 28, 1993" or for the "double-click" patent, "(Score:-1, Troll)" or maybe that one would just get a page full of hot grits and FRiSt PoST!

I really am serious. How many stories does /. do a day, and how many patents show up a day? I really don't know the volume, but why not a moderation system?

Re:USPTO respected?

[Ender Ryan]

Fucking priceless. Just now as the FTC is looking into why the USPTO grants something ridiculous like 95% of all patent applications that come their way...

Internationally respected just like this dolt knows the history of UNIX!

Re:USPTO respected?

[caesar79]

'Cause no one RTFA(s).

Re:USPTO respected?

[caesar79]

...but why not a moderation system?

'Cause no one RTFA(s).

Re:USPTO respected?

[jonathan_95060]

Internationally respected agency? cough sideways swinging cough

Re:USPTO respected?

[91degrees]

Well, I don't disagree that the United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

In the past I would have agreed with you, but since I find myself disagreeing with everything Mr. Brown has to say, I can only conclude that this is untrue.

Re:USPTO respected?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because a patent is worth a heckuva lot more than karma. The risk that the system would be trolled by company reps is too great.

Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[shatfield]

Its purpose is to provide U.S. leadership with a researched presentation on attribution and intellectual property problems with the hybrid source code model, particularly Linux. It is our hope that leadership would find this document helpful with public policy decisions regarding its future investment in Linux and other hybrid source products.

So they are writing a book of lies to give to non-technical politicians in order to persuade public policy.

So who is going to step forward and write a book, of researched FACTS to counteract this work of FICTION?

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Rimbo]

That's a great idea, and now that we know their motives, we know to whom this book should be addressed.

My God, reading this thing... Ken Brown assumed his conclusion from the start. He has a rabid religious fervor to his response; I can see the spit flying from his lips just reading the text.

What's clear is that like all True Believers, Ken Brown will do anything possible to win, and he will never give up. He will not rest to his dying days to fight what he has started. He has put himself in a position he must defend. He is going to shout what he wants to anyone who will listen, and as most people are ignorant of the issue, many of them will.

The only proper response is to educate the masses with the truth before Ken Brown can spread his lies.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[raidient]

It's generally accepted that politicians prefer lies (and liars), as it puts them at their ease to know they are around like minded people.
Honesty, in any form, leads to angst, and is therefore avoided at all times.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone could certainly step forward and pay pj to write a book.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[goon america]

You may also be interested in the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Disinfopedia page

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Black Art]

So should we refer to this as AdTInetics or SCOintology?

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Anonymous Coward]

He will not rest to his dying days to fight what he has started. . . . The only proper response is to educate the masses with the truth before Ken Brown can spread his lies.

I'd have thought a better response might be to hasten his dying day...

(Tomorrow we bring you a new press release from AdTI: "Within hours of my response to these rabid critics, I was already being virulently attacked, with death threats being posted on notorious hacker weblogs like Dotslash...")

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Frizzle Fry]

My God, reading this thing... Ken Brown assumed his conclusion from the start. He has a rabid religious fervor to his response

As opposed to everyone in this discussion of course, who read Brown's essay with a completely open mind. Right? Becuase frankly some of what he says is interesting and makes a lot of sense. Some of it also doesn't (why would software under "true open source" licenses like BSD be more immune to the legal problems of including stolen proprietary code than GPL'd code would? Just because proprietary code can use BSD-style code doesn't mean the reverse is true), but no one here seems interested in actually addressing and of his points, just snickering and assuming he must be wrong. The discussion here seems to have a lot more "rabid religious fervor" than the Brown article.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[shatfield]

SCOintology.... that is GREAT! Perfectly fitting, IMHO.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[fatray]

Brown is writing this to scare people that know nothing about software, open source, operating systems, etc. That is something like over 95% of Americans. The real target of this is the cadre of congressional staff drones that advise Senators and Representatives. What he wants is (not in order):

1. ensure that software produced with government funding is released under a BSD-type license rather than GPL

2. prevent the government from using GPL software

3. legislation passed to outlaw the GPL

I think that he has missed an opportunity to blame off-shore out sourcing on Linux/GPL. Maybe that will be in the book.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[cduffy]

Frankly, PJ has gotten a bit religious herself lately. I still respect Groklaw as a source of fact -- but have been needing to pick that fact out from the editorial on increasingly frequent occasion.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Rimbo]

Perhaps you're right.

I make my living doing work for Linux. Linux created job opportunities for us that didn't exist before it, and has created far more opportunities for the software industry than it has destroyed. Brown seeks to destroy my livelihood, and from what I've read, he's willing to lie, twist, and distort to do it. In fact, that's all he seems able to do.

When it comes to a choice between trying to reason with a liar and defending our ability to feed our children, we'll take the children every time.

So I apologize to you, since we're not exactly being calm and polite about this.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Tony-A]

with a researched presentation

Researched?
A few leading questions answered quite differently than the direction lead constitutes research substantiating the original direction?
Methinks the National Enquirer has higher standards!

And what on earth does he mean by "hybrid source code model"?

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[ncurses]

Yes. His only rebuttal seems to be something along the lines of "You open-sourcers think you're better than me?" It's the first element of the caption on the main page for crying out loud.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[jcr]

The discussion here seems to have a lot more "rabid religious fervor" than the Brown article.

Well, I'm one who has no stake at all in the question of whether Linus wrote Linux, and it's still very plain to me that Ken Brown is neither a scholar nor a journalist. He's a paid polemicist, and no more worthy of our attention than the characters in MS's fictitious switcher ads.

-jcr

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[justsomebody]

So they are writing a book of lies...

Nope, they are writing the truth they wanna hear. They didn't lie, they just twisted truth and cut *WRONG* parts of sentences (At least to get to the truth they wanted to publish).

So who is going to step forward and write a book, of researched FACTS to counteract this work of FICTION?

Pretenderle????

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[jcr]

Holy CRAP! These people are TOBACCO industry shills, too?

Ok, that's all I needed to know.

-jcr

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[dubious9]

As misguided as Ken Brown is he hardly seems rabbid. His thoughts are clear and consise, even though they are founded on shaky groud. It seems like he wants Linus to say, "Yeah, I took what I knew about minix and applied it to create Linux."

Except that he said that before 0.1 came out. I just don't know what he wants. Andrew T. wrote minix and doesn't seems to have a problem with it. Much of the organization of Unix had become public domain.

You can't resonably expect IP protection when you write a text book. The main purpose of a text book is to distribute knowledge. Ok, so stealing source code is mmm... bad ok? But show me where 1 year old linux source code came from? 22K loc in one year? Hell yeah he was working hard but in a non-corporate environment (like he was comparing Denise Richtie) one can write a LOT of code. That's 60 loc a day. Deal.

In conclusion, is this guy rabbid? I don't think so, but I think he's barking up the wrong tree.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[flacco]

The only proper response is to educate the masses with the truth before Ken Brown can spread his lies.

Light your brain farts. [rimbosity.com]

i especially like how your sig so compliments your plea for greater education of the masses.

oh wait... um, never mind.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[StenD]

So they are writing a book of lies to give to non-technical politicians in order to persuade public policy.

As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention how much "Kenneth" Brown owes to all the people who have developed the english language, and who have developed printing, and who have developed book binding. What the hell does he think, that he can just go use a product like MicroSoft Word, that he did not write, and make MILLIONS after typing on a keyboard he has no IP rights in, on a laptop he most certainly did not create, and using software that he most certainly has NO IP rights in and is merely licensing, and then claim that he has some sort of fundamental right to create what he would probably assume is a "new" work of IP? How dare he have the audacity to claim that he did anything? He is obviously using the patented method of shysters everywhere to make up "facts". For this alone, he should be forced to turn over ALL his IP rights to people like Dr Hubbard, who because of his untimely demise the Church will most certainly accept.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[NortWind]

...to scare people that know nothing about software, open source, operating systems, etc.

Hey, you are talking about "U.S. leadership" there. This is the stated target audience. A little respect, please.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[fatboy]

why would software under "true open source" licenses like BSD be more immune to the legal problems of including stolen proprietary code than GPL'd code would?

It's in no way "more immune". Please, back up that accertion with some type of argument. BTW: GPL code is "true open source", because YOU GET THE SOURCE and DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Crazy Eight]

I don't think he sounds like a rabid "true believer" at all. He just sounds like an ignorant propogandist or shill.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[peeping_Thomist]

When it comes to a choice between trying to reason with a liar and defending our ability to feed our children, we'll take the children every time.

Thank God somebody is thinking about the children!!!

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Bob9113]

So who is going to step forward and write a book, of researched FACTS to counteract this work of FICTION?

Facts? Facts? Have you gone daft?!? What this situation calls for is not facts. What we need is truckloads of corporate grade bullshit. While I believe the last thing we should do is attempt to directly refute anything Ken Brown has said (that's a land war in Asia), we should be creating vacuous Powerpoint presentations (OpenOffice exports quite nicely to that format) backed by acres of specious logical fallacies showing exactly why Open Source will bring about the second coming of the 1950's.

Emotionally, I agree with you - I'm a computer scientist, perhaps like yourself, and like most of the people here. Granted, we are concerned with the rational processing and presentation of information, and the facts certainly are vastly in support of the economic benefits of FLOSS. But consider our target audience - rational people have small place in the US government. If this were India and we had an economist as a Prime Minister, maybe, but here? Facts are the last thing we need.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Anonymous Coward]

My God, reading this thing... Ken Brown assumed his conclusion from the start. He has a rabid religious fervor to his response; I can see the spit flying from his lips just reading the text.

What's clear is that like all True Believers, Ken Brown will do anything possible to win, and he will never give up. He will not rest to his dying days to fight what he has started. He has put himself in a position he must defend. He is going to shout what he wants to anyone who will listen, and as most people are ignorant of the issue, many of them will.


LOL, this is actually funny coming from the Linux community. If anything, its most of the people in *this* community that are exactly as described. Just apply this description to any linux supporter and you'll see it fits (of course, you need to be a little more *open* minded for that!-- pun intended --)

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Rimbo]

"Thank God somebody is thinking about the children!!!"

hahahaha! :) :) :)

Bizarre factoid:

During the 2000 campaign, a Republican strategist observed that women respond to the phrase "for the children" positively, regardless of context. (Within reason, of course.)

So, for our children, we must ensure the continued propagation and promotion of the Linux kernel!

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember when RedHat, SuSE, Debian stood together and responded to charges against the Linux community? It would only make sense for everyone from ERS to RMS, from Dennis Ritchie to Linux Torvalds and Tanenbaum, to work together and respond to Ken Brown.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[GooTi]

So, for our children, we must ensure the continued propagation and promotion of the Linux kernel!

It didn't work, I'm a (geekish) male.

May be the other way around works for us:

Let's have lots of children so they can mantain future Linux kernels!

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[GooTi]

I don't think he sounds like a rabid "true believer" at all.

He might have written his '''article''' using Emacs. He seems to have a crush on RMS, after all.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[RoLi]

why would software under "true open source" licenses like BSD be more immune to the legal problems of including stolen proprietary code than GPL'd code would?

Why would software under commercial licenses be more immune?

There are numerous examples of commercial software stealing from OSS, but examples of the other way around are very rare.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I read on that page, it's easy to spot them as an awkward CIA funded mouthpiece.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Net_Wakker]

During the 2000 campaign, a Republican strategist observed that women respond to the phrase "for the children" positively, regardless of context. (Within reason, of course.) So, for our children, we must ensure the continued propagation and promotion of the Linux kernel!

good point. We need more chicks in *nix.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[CamTarn]

...to scare people that know nothing about software, open source, operating systems, etc.

Hey, you are talking about "U.S. leadership" there. This is the stated target audience. A little respect, please.

Perhaps "...to scare people that know nothing..." would be more appropriate?

</flamebait> ;)

Seriously, though, if I were a US high-heidyin who came from a non-technical background, and I were handed this report, I would probably have a good chance of trusting it over the opinions of a load of 'fanatical left-wing rabble who believe all software should be free'.

It's not my opinion, obviously - I'm all for Open Source - but I would not be surprised if people would be more inclined to believe a publication that came out in book form, written by a leader of an Institute, rather than anything from the great nebulous cloud of fact, FUD, opinion, bullshit, informed and uninformed debate and flamewars that can be found online.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Anonymous Coward]

"hybrid source" is a laughable term. If it is intended to imply that something is a product of mixing open source and restricted source, then Windows is and example of "hybrid source".

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Frizzle Fry]

Please, back up that accertion with some type of argument

What assertion? I'm very confused. Did you mean to quote a different sentence? The one you quoted is one where I was questioning a claim that Brown made and not making any assertion.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[Frizzle Fry]

Why would software under commercial licenses be more immune?

As with the above response to my comment, I'm confused by this one too. You quote a sentence from me, and then ask a question unrelated to my post. What do "commercial licenses" have to do with anything? When were those even brought up? I don't see how this is in response to the sentence you quoted from me at all.

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[RoLi]

Actually I was just extending your point, no need to attack me...

Re:Here it is, exactly what Brown is up to!

[fatboy]

What assertion? I'm very confused. Did you mean to quote a different sentence? The one you quoted is one where I was questioning a claim that Brown made and not making any assertion.

Doh! My bad. Sorry bout that. I was a little pissed off about that assertion.

In other news...

[raistphrk]

Ken Brown was recently offered a position at the Jason Blair Institute for Fabrication and Fraud. Officially duties include making up interview transcripts and inventing names for alleged contributers.

Re:In other news...

[raidient]

Was that all true?

Re:In other news...

[pjt33]

No, he changed "Tony" to "Jason" for legal reasons.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Acutally Ken Brown is a brother, just like Jason Blair.

Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[Brackney]

Am I missing something, or is the implication made that Linux became a fullblown and mature OS overnight? The earliest version that Linus put together was incomplete and immature. No one ever claimed that Linus got from version 0.0 to 2.x.y all by his lonesome. We all know (now) that he had plenty of help from Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy...

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[RatBastard]

The first kernel I ever used was 0.97. Back in 1993 or 1994.

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[scoove]

s the implication made that Linux became a fullblown and mature OS overnight?

Exactly. I was first introduced to Linux when it took two 5.25 floppies. Coming from Ultrix and having messed with Minix for a few months, I was shocked at what Linux couldn't do.

We were joking about writing a VMS emulator under Ultrix, and this Linux stuff seemed to be not much more than some PC UNIX mockup to my unsophisticated eyes. I certainly didn't see the potential at the time.

Linux was nothing like Minix. And those that were UNIX geeks in the early 90s probably remember that all the attention and excitement was on BSD/386, not Linux.

So if one thing is clear, it's that Ken Brown didn't learn how to turn on a PC until the past couple of years. Still, it's nice to know that such incapable people with high self-esteem can get hired for such senior positions at the Toqueville Institute...

*scoove*

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[Wavicle]

No you are not missing anything. Yes he is implying that Linux became a full blown mature OS overnight. It's the only way to support his argument. Many of us, but few others, realize that Linux started small and then a large group of contributors popped up and started adding things.

If you read closely, he implies that Linus wrote version 1.0 of the kernel. This is just untrue. We all know this. I remember installing kernel 0.99pl14 using one of the first releases of slackware. By that time there was already a large group of individual contributors.

But nobody would be swayed if he said "are we to believe that Linus wrote this small, buggy OS that couldn't even boot itself all by himself?" After all, that's what the first version was. Subsequent versions were a collaboration among many people all over the world.

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[dietz]

Check out this, though:

Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes...

So, what he's apparently claiming is that Linux is stolen code because Linus used BOOKS when he wrote it.

All true hackers were born with knowledge of C. Anyone who had to read a book about it is a thief.

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[DaveJay]

I might be completely off my nut, but here's the thing: I thought that the Linux kernel, as originally written by Linus Torvalds, WAS crap, more or less -- and that it was his willingness to accept contributions from other people that made it what it is today, not Linus per se (although his social engineering skills are par excellence). Am I wrong about this?

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[0x0d0a]

Linus probably has contributed more code to Linux than anone else...but, sure, there are a lot of other people. He started it, though, and "Linux" sounds cool and friendly, so why change it? Linus has done one hell of a job over the years coding, making engineering decisions, keeping development from forking, managing people...he deserves the credit, and he's certainly no "manager only" type like Jobs is or Gates has become.

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[Pseudonym]

I think that's true. As Ken Brown pointed out, Linus had only a year or so of C experience at the time. As Linus has pointed out, a lot of that code embarrasses him today.

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[the gnat]

If you read closely, he implies that Linus wrote version 1.0 of the kernel.

Yes, he claims that Linus and his supporters were claiming that Linus authored 32,000 lines of code that made a working kernel in a year as a first-year CS student. I read this and thought, wow, maybe Brown has a point. That's a pretty complex app.

So I downloaded some older kernels. I decided to look back earlier than 1.0. 0.01 is available from kernel.org, and is dated from the fall of 1991. With headers and everything, 'wc' reports that the entire thing is less than 7500 lines. (That includes blank lines, comments, lines with a single brace, etc.)

By the time you get to 0.95, released six months later, the kernel has grown to just under 9000 lines. The memory allocation routines are not even by Linux, but contributed by Theodore T'so at MIT.

By July of '92, four months after 0.95, the 0.96c kernel has around 11,500 lines. Linux already has mailing lists and alt.os.linux, and a growing user community testing the code.

Version 1.0 is not released until the spring of 1994, by which point the project was two and a half years old, and had 80 contributors listed. It is indeed around 32,000 lines, and is clearly not all Linus' work. It had also undergone extensive testing by a very skilled community.

Linus' original kernel seems like a very reasonable project for an undergrad, and someone pointed out that it was pretty raw at the beginning. I wrote a large code library this spring, and although it's packed with comments it's about 6000 lines. And I'm a biologist, not a CS student. Looking at kernel 0.01, I think I could write this if I wanted to, once I learned some basic OS design. (Guiding it from an undergrad project into an industry-leading product, on the other hand, I could not do, and therein lies Linus' real brilliance.)

The complete history of kernel releases is publically available on the web, and it's easy to verify that a) the original kernel was both small and incomplete, b) the initial growth of the kernel was slow, c) version 1.0 was neither written in a year nor did it pretend to be written solely by Linus. In other words, Brown is ignorant and/or flat-out lying, and can't even get the facts in his rebuttal correct. He's not doing much to dispell the impression that this is a paid disinformation campaign with little factual basis.

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[el-spectre]

I think "crap" is a bit harsh (I know you didn't mean it as an attack), he was limited to a single machine(his), not much time with the language, and being the first time he'd written an OS.

Plus, it's cold there and he had to fight off Yetis...

(I just read Linus's autobiography... interesting read. Not a tech book, but an interesting history of Linux.)

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[Brackney]

This is a really succinct chronology that matches my understanding of the Linux kernel's early history and puts the lie to Brown's text. Thanks for taking the time to write it, Gnat! As you say, Linus' real strength is in managing the project that the Linux kernel has become. He just also happened to be in the right place at the right time when he posted that original memo announcing his infant kernel all those years ago.

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Am I missing something, or is the implication made that Linux became a fullblown and mature OS overnight?

Evidently Mr. Brown does seem to think that. The fact that he believes that the first version of Linux was "1.0" speaks volumes about his complete lack of any real research.

He was hoping to get a juicy sound bite out of Dennis Ritchie about how Linux 1.0 was lifted from Unix 1.0. Naturally, he didn't get it. Nor did he get any juicy sound bites from Tannenbaum claiming that Linux 1.0 came from Minix 1.0. Frustrated, Mr. Brown simply ignored his interviewees and pulled his "facts" out of thin air.

There's that word again. Facts. Now we know that Ken Brown and Martin Taylor use the same dictionary -- the one where "facts" is defined as "pretty much anything you want to make up."

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[Ohreally_factor]

This is the tip of the iceberg. Think about all the IP theft that has occured in the days before computers. All those so called "authors", stealing intellectual property from the paper companies and the pencil industry. We need congressional hearings to investigate this abuse, which continues unabated to this day.

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[grotgrot]

I started on Linux during the kernel 0.11 to 0.12 transition. It didn't have networking. It didn't have a lot of stuff. For example there was no 'ps' command which was implemented by various hacks months after 0.12 was released.

Even the multi-tasking was simple. Instead of seperate address spaces like you have now (imagine having seperate pages in a book, only viewing one at a time, and a task switch changes the page), everything was all in one big address space with 64MB of address range per process. The kernel just had to flip a few pointers to point at the current task, and that meant task switching was really fast (the page is never flipped, you just look at a different portion of it).

You had to boot the kernel off a floppy and only the Minix filesystem was available. (And no he didn't take the Minix code since that used micro-kernel servers to implement the filesystem and sucked.)

Shared libraries were a dream yet to happen.

But you could use gcc to compile the kernel, there was a C library available that took a really long time to compile.

Everybody just pitched in and contributed bug fixes, enhancements and ported various utilities across to Linux. In fact that happened at such a great speed that the next kernel version was 0.95.

And a common machine of the time was a 33MHz 386 with 4MB of RAM and 100MB hard disk. My 2 year old video card has a 500MHz processor and 128MB of RAM!

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[Angst Badger]

The earliest version that Linus put together was incomplete and immature.

Cripes, tell me about it. I remember when some exceedingly early version of something called "Linux" showed up on a local BBS. I spent a couple of evenings trying to get it to work, without success. Minix, on the other hand, worked like a charm, and at the time, it was more sophisticated and reliable than Linux. This alone argues against the idea that Linux was built on top of Minix.

Early versions of Linux were not worth a shit unless you were a bored programmer and wanted to help Linus with his project. I remember the sorry thing, for crying out loud -- it was a student project and not a very promising one at that. Oh sure, it's damn spiffy now, but it wasn't back then. The idea that Linus stole code from the likes of Ken Thompson or Andrew Tanenbaum is just silly if you actually compare the code. Of course, Brown isn't qualified to do that.

The thing that's really irritating about this is the notion that it's somehow a monumental task to write a simple operating system -- and let us remember, the first public release of Linux was a simple operating system. Simple operating systems are, at more than a few universities, the end product of a single semester class. It's the years of work by thousands of talented programmers that made it into a complex, full-featured, stable OS. Brown seems unable or unwilling to grasp this.

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[versus]

0.01 is available from kernel.org, and is dated from the fall of 1991. With headers and everything, 'wc' reports that the entire thing is less than 7500 lines. (That includes blank lines, comments, lines with a single brace, etc.)

I used SLOCCOUNT utility.

Linux v0.01 source tree:

Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic: 6975 (85.35%)
asm: 1197 (14.65%)

Re:Does he think Linux was completed overnight?

[maximilln]

Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch

Everyone knows that Linuxfromscratch is written by Beekmans.

He writes like a tool

[CaptainSuperBoy]

The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office

Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector.

Ironically, Professor Tanenbaum's recent comments only recapitulate many of the substantive contradictions regarding the early Linux kernel AdTI decided to discuss in Samizdat.

What an idiot.

Re:He writes like a tool

[tweek]

It's funny. I read this line and wondered to myself...if it is having such a terrible effect on the IT industry, why the hell did my company just spend alomst 1 million dollars on IBM software (websphere, db2, tivoli) and IBM hardware for our new datacenter all running on RedHat Enterprise Linux which we also PURCHASED?

Surely we can't be alone in that regard?

Re:He writes like a tool

[hpa]

He's not an idiot, he's a paid stooge.

Re:He writes like a tool

[AndroidCat]

His spelling-checker tool is borken too. Count the number of times he uses noone in that article (instead of no one). Any bets that there's a loose instead of lose in there too?

He doesn't know copyright/trademark/patent law. He doesn't know the history of Unix. He probably doesn't program, and now he can't spell. What are the job requirements for a stooge?

Re:He writes like a tool

[netsharc]

A troll, more like it. What do we do with a troll with money, who's going to use it to publish the book. Argh, it pisses me off.

It's an annoying troll article, the 2nd paragraph begins with a hilarious inaccuracy: "The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency", respected? Buahahahaa..

Re:He writes like a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

Ken Brown writes like the person he is -- someone who was bucked along by "affirmative action" social policies which rewarded skin color instead of real achievement.

Re:He writes like a tool

[yuri benjamin]

What an idiot

It is dangerous to assume he's an idiot. He probably has better access to The People Who Run Things than you or I. Lawmakers don't read slashdot or groklaw. Lawmakers listen to propaganda from groups like AdTI. The only defense for those of us whose incomes rely on OSS is to educate the very people that AdTI are trying to fool. We won't achieve that by posting on /.

Re:He writes like a tool

[boots@work]

He's a paid stooge *and also* an idiot.

If he was more intelligent, he would write more credible astroturf. Previous Microsoft FUD has been written to a much higher intellectual standard.

Re:He writes like a tool

[ThomaMelas]

Here is a resume sample: Experance: Three year apprenticeship with Donald Trump, most of time spent on knees, lips firmly attached to rear. Two years being a research assistant, over 12,000 facts made up, 10,000 quotes completely made up, 3,000 slashdot posts defending MS. Education: Sold soul to devil for these sponge dinosaurs...

Re:He writes like a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

You bought websphere?! You poor bastard. Enjoy the bullshit classloader, the 'session replication' that replicates nothing, the 'connection pool' that fails.

But I'm sure those FUCKERS from IBM will enjoy your money.

Re:He writes like a tool

[Tarantolato]

I noticed that too. I don't know who this "Noone" character he keeps talking about is, but he doesn't sound like a very nice fellow.

Re:He writes like a tool

[SpaceLifeForm]

When you start to get desperate, and need a product put together in a hurry, well, you get less quality.

Re:He writes like a tool

[dubl-u]

His spelling-checker tool is borken too. Count the number of times he uses noone in that article (instead of no one).

Well, noone is actually a common Scottish slang word meaning "one's own penis".

Re:He writes like a tool

[AndroidCat]

Ah, that would explain why he seems to know Richard All.

Re:He writes like a tool

[Mr Smidge]

Yeah, and don't get me started on this bit:

Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property? Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?

Tut tut. Brown can't have been thinking too hard whilst writing this...

Brown says it all here:

[roystgnr]

Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property? Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?

I certainly agree.

The difference is that I'm smart enough to recognize that when Linus Torvalds is telling a joke it isn't an expression of contempt for intellectual property, but when Ken Brown is viciously slandering an innocent author in order to try and sabotage the use of that authors creation it shows utter contempt for IP law.

Unfortunately, although everyone has questioned Brown's character, Brown doesn't want to answer any of those questions. This is just another "Linus couldn't have written Linux himself!" rant, which posts all of Browns leading questions and attempts to trap people into misleading soundbites, but which doesn't answer the most obvious question everyone has been asking: who is paying him to write this crap?

Re:Brown says it all here:

[The Lynxpro]

"This is just another "Linus couldn't have written Linux himself!"

I agree completely with your post. When people claim the Linux kernel was too difficult to write by one person, I would remind those very naysayers that television was created by a 13 year old. Individuals can do extraordinary things.

Re:Brown says it all here:

[goon america]

who is paying him to write this crap?

Microsoft

Re:Brown says it all here:

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Who? I've never heard that one before.

Re:Brown says it all here:

[magictongue]

Brown's best case is that nothing is invented or innovated in a vacuum. This is true of open source or prioritary software. Linus did not start from nothing and create Linux. From school, reading, and discussion with others he learned how to write an operating system. Linus did not need to fumble around repeating others mistakes. Instead, he borrowed on the good ideas of others than came before him. This is the way all progress is made. We take the good ideas and proven techniques and build on them. This is far different from saying that Linus stole the code for Linux. He is the rightfull creator of Linux and should be given credit. Microsoft itself is famous for hiring away skilled programmers from other companies to write code. Wasn't it some DEC VMS programmers who were hired away to write the original Windows NT? Talk about a direct and legal way to steal other companies intellectual property. Hire the guys that wrote it so they can reuse there skills and _ideas_ for you. Either way, Brown has only proved that ideas come from pre-existing ideas. Nothing more.

Re:Brown says it all here:

[pardu]

Really? Who? I've never heard that one before.

Philo T. Farnsworth

Re:Brown says it all here:

[isdnip]

Good point about NT. The original author of Windows NT, and I think still a leader in MS OS development, was David N. Cutler. He joined MS from DEC. He left DEC when they cancelled Mica, a VMS-like operating system that was decoupled from VAX hardware. Mica was being written at DECwest near Seattle, a site opened at Cutler's request -- he was that influential.

Before moving west, Cutler had been the lead author of VAX/VMS (1977), reportely writing a rather large share of the V1.0 kernel himself. (He was said to be very, very fast at assembly programming, but created inefficient code. Very "V1".) Before writing VMS, he had worked on RSX-11. The original VAX/VMS was upward compatible from RSX, and indeed included RSX as a mode. (By the mid-1980s, PDP-11 emulation capabilities had been dropped from VAX hardware.)

People who are familiar with the innards have said that NT is closely modeled on VMS (which was decoupled from the VAX when Alpha came out; it has since been ported to Itanic). But that's not a reason to whine. Cutler had some good ideas, and he expressed them several different ways. He almost certainly didn't lift DEC code directly into NT -- although at the time, DEC did indeed make most VMS sources readily available (on microfiche -- not to be too easy to use). Oh yeah, VMS was mostly written in assembler and BLISS, not C.

If Linus' efforts were unoriginal, how do Cutler's at Microsoft compare? Is the pot calling the kettle black? Personally I think neither is guilty of wrongdoing. I'm even getting to sort of like Win2k, which I use on the laptop, though XP's bloat is just annoying, and 98's instability is really annoying.

Contratiction #1

[jm.one]

""Hybrid source code" is a phrase coined by former Tocqueville Chairman Gregory Fossedal. The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time. While hybrid software appears to be the same as open source, it isn't. Hybrid source code can never be true intellectual property. The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as private property, which makes the hybrid source model significantly different from true open source. " If read this again and again. It just won`t make sense. Or did I really miss anything?

Hmmm...

[Reteo Varala]

"Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector."

I think I read a phrase once that fit quite nicely... what was it again?

Oh, yeah, that's it...

"Tough. Adapt or die."

Re:Hmmm...

[Art Tatum]

"Tough. Adapt or die."

Exactly. Let the free market decide what solutions are best and at what costs. But besides all that, what's this business about Linux "depreciating the value of the software industry"? Linux often makes the IT industry more efficient and effective. Even software businesses can profit from it. Hell, even Microsoft can profit from Linux by writing and selling software for it. Ignorance, we have met thee, and thy name is Ken Brown.

Re:Hmmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector."

I am a professional slashdot poster. I add value to the slashdot website by posting witty interesting or insightful things and then I send the bill to cmdrTaco.

I cannot make a living if you dirty hippies keep giving it away for free! Posting without charging for it is un-American and unconstitutional. I'm warning you guys, if you keep trying to drive me out of business I'll get litigious.

Nobody else respond. Article over. I mean it.

Re:Hmmm...

[Blastrogath]

"Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector."

This is nothing new. What do you think henry ford did to his competitors? The only way to avoid "steadily depreciating the value" of somebodies business is to never invent better ways to do anything. This is blatant anti-progress retoric.

Re:Hmmm...

[Rimbo]

I think Linux has created far more jobs than it has destroyed.

It's kept me employed for the past 2.5 years.

I think that's a big reason why this is such a hot-button issue for me.

Yeah but ..

[kbsingh]

Mr Brown, seems to have made loads of statements with no real basis to back him up at all - much unlike his critics who have used real facts and figures to build upon. Where did he come up with statements like 'Linux is a leprosy' - and have nothing at all to say as to why he thinks its like that. He has no answer to his critics, so he will evade the real issues and facts, just try to keep people thinking about different things by such a response.

Okay, so he says that Linux might not be good for the s/w industry ( uneducated and uninformed as he is, he is most likely wrong ) - but is that the only industry there is in this whole world ? dont the other industries ( who have been held to ransom, more or less by organisations like MS and Sage ), also have a right to benefit ? If you look at the reality - the user base is many many times higher than the provider base. So how does the economy suffer ?

All in all, its not even worth commenting on this anymore. Mr. Brown is the hall mark of a paid dog, who is going to make a fwe bucks from his backers who want to see Linux down - cause they are incapable of doing that in real terms, tech terms or in direct compeition - so they must resort to people like Ken Brown to create this fascade and false FUD.

Look around you - does any of this work ?

If Linux wasent as big a threat to MS and such companies, they would leave it alone. But they cant, because Linux IS very much a threat - and its breaking them down.

Re:Yeah but ..

[Dastardly]

Okay, so he says that Linux might not be good for the s/w industry ( uneducated and uninformed as he is, he is most likely wrong ) - but is that the only industry there is in this whole world ? dont the other industries ( who have been held to ransom, more or less by organisations like MS and Sage ), also have a right to benefit ? If you look at the reality - the user base is many many times higher than the provider base. So how does the economy suffer ?

This is something that I wish more people would get. In the big picture software is an expense that is paid by those producing end products. There are some exceptions where the sofware is an end in itself (games come to mind). But, they are few. A spreadsheet is simply a tool to increase productivity and reduce costs The price paid is a transfer of some of the savings of that increase in productivity to the software developer. If a sofware development model comes about that reduces the cost of the software i.e. how much is paid to the developer (or uses fewer developers), then that is a good thing.

What we want to see is the minimization of the costs of software, that is the best thing for the economy because then resources can be routed to productive undertakings. The ideal open source situation minimizes the cost of software, by distributing the developers among the end users. Thereby eliminating a complete management organization, and eliminating profits paid to another organization. i.e. the cost of Bill Gates and much of the Microsoft infrastructure is eliminated.

Re:Yeah but ..

[Anonymous Coward]

True. Cutting through all of the rhetoric and posturing, Brown has no real hard facts. He is merely bellowing an opinion not shared by those who know. It is odd that he keeps on with his rants in an apparent cognitive dissonance at this point. He is attacking Tanenbaum, a person whom I believe Brown was hoping would echo support for his case. This reeks of tactics inherent in other causes/administrations in the Western world today.

He is talking out of his ass.

[timlewis_atlanta]

Ken Brown's writings are garbage. By publicising this you're just giving him free press. Ignore him. As Alexey Toptygin said : "pay no attention to this man" ... "he is talking out of his ass".

Re:He is talking out of his ass.

[Our Man In Redmond]

The problem with that of course is that if we ignore him, he becomes free to spout his lies, half-truths, misinformation and FUD to anyone who will listen and who doesn't know any better. And unfortunately, his book is aimed at people who, while they might or might not listen, don't know any better, but won't let that stop them when they enact policies and laws governing free and open source software.

Sorry, but the consequences of not acting are worse than the consequences of overacting. And remember, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing."

What is this noone word?

[SiChemist]

What's up with Brown's consistent use of noone? I don't think it means what he thinks it means.

Re:What is this noone word?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's referring to his old college buddy, Alfred "Nooner" Prendergast. "Noone" (pronounced noo-nie) was rather infamous for leaving class early for lunch, much to Ken's chagrin. Don't mind any non-capitalization of the nickname, it's just informalism.

Re:What is this noone word?

[Anonymous Coward]

it is no one

Re:What is this noone word?

[AndroidCat]

I thought Khan's not-evil twin? Charles Noone Singh. I've always heard that Noone cares.

I saw that

[CaptainSuperBoy]

I don't think it means anything at all.

Newsforge comments as primary source

[ozten]

This guy actually uses Newsforge comments as a primary source! He is commenting on Cisco code theft and that open source zealots are happy it happened, his footnote 3 points to a Comments page.

Sooooo gooood.

Re:Newsforge comments as primary source

[Xardion]

I don't think it would be a stretch of the imagination to speculate that Ken or somebody in his pay astroturfed that one, posting that comment in preparation for his book. Hmmmm, interesting.

Re:Newsforge comments as primary source

[k4_pacific]

Yes, the open source community belives that such sources are not particularly relevant [1].

[1] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=110032&cid=934 0960

Re:Newsforge comments as primary source

[arcanumas]

It's more like an article (even though it sa commentary in the title) and ,most importantly, it's written by ESR

However, Brown's comment are completely misleading.
What ESR talks about is the security 'strenghening' that happens when software of extreme importance like the IOS has been exposed to many eyes (included the hacker/cracker community).
He says that the theft could potentially bring a be the source of many new exploits that would have been discovered and corrected in on OSS software.

The comment that Brown uses ("maybe the theft will be a good enough reason for Cisco customers to check out open source alternatives...) actually means that given the problems that could arise from this theft, many corporations may choose a product that has been developed with a differrent method.

Brown's whole article is full of errors and clear attempts to misinform and confuse.
This, however, is for other to respond to.

My favorite part is his response to (tannembaum's) comment that Brown is not the "not the sharpest knife in the drawer". He say (among othe things) that: "but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people, and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world."

dude. So can Britney Spears!

Mispellings ruin one's credibility

[jlowery]

It's hard to take a guy seriously when in a semi-formal publication he repeatedly uses the non-word 'noone'. Doesn't this guy know english?

Re:Mispellings ruin one's credibility

[kidgenius]

Didn't you read at the end where he says:
"He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer,"

Re:Mispellings ruin one's credibility

[jlowery]

He's supposed to be a writer, FCOL. I'm an occasional writer, too, and look: I've misspelled 'mispelling'-- but I'd catch that before I formatted an article all pretty by running it through a spell checker once or twice. Sloppy. Like his research.

Re:Mispellings ruin one's credibility

[fatray]

You know you're posting to Slashdot, right?

Re:Mispellings ruin one's credibility

[AndroidCat]

He did run it though his spell-checker. It used to complain about words like noone until he added them to his local word list. ;)

Re:Mispellings ruin one's credibility

[The Conductor]

He must...five replies & "noone" has noticed that "Mispellings" is a misspelling!

Re:What a hatchet job

[raistphrk]

Um, while this is a blatant troll job here, it's certainly not a good one.

The problem is, Ken Brown HASN'T made a great case. The guy contacted a bunch of Unix hackers pretending to be writing a book about the Unix timeline, when in reality his only agenda was to come up with some load of hooey about Linus stealing source from Minix. And the sad part is, he was repeatedly given information quite to the contrary, and completely ignored all of that data. I mean...when Dr. Tanenbaum comes right out and says "Well, while I don't approve of Linus adding tons of functionality to Linux, because I'm a minimalist, I will say that Linus didn't steal any of my source code", and yet, Brown completely disregards Dr. Tanenbaum's answer, you know the guy is hardly a credible author.

No, the only hatchet job I've seen is one carried out by Ken Brown against Linus. Brown set out with an agenda: to try and say that Linux was pirated, so that he could lend credence to the SCO case, to Microsoft, and to all of the anti-open source/free software zealots out there. The guy got lambasted by computer scientists because he was dead wrong, and he should've seen it coming. I mean...his claims are about as good as the wackjobs who routinely crop up to claim that the Earth is flat. Those guys get tons of PR, because EVERYBODY AND THEIR DOG KNOWS THEY'RE WRONG. Then, after they're properly put in their place, they leave the spotlight and we resume our lives, until the next idiot comes along with another worthless and asinine assertation.

Ken Brown, Anonymous Coward

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy has no more credibility than me, the Anonymous Coward.

If you don't believe me, try to find out anything at all about him. Their site isn't offering up any clues about his credentials. Searching for his generic (and IMO probably fake) name along with appropriate keywords hit just about nothing.

Loser, Idiot, Nobody.

Likely bought and paid for by the Conspiracy who created him.

Re:Ken Brown, Anonymous Coward

[ebbomega]

Loser, Idiot, Nobody.
Don't you mean "Lose, Idiot, Noone"?

Yes, I RTFA ...

[Professor D]

And noticed this at the bottom ...

Kenneth Brown ... is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer,"

Feel free to provide your own punchline ...

Re:Yes, I RTFA ...

[Yobgod Ababua]

That's probably the only actual response to the comments people have made questioning the validity of his research.

From scratch...

[Brandybuck]

Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes -- certainly not a line of source code to borrow from, or to be tempted to borrow from.

Mr. Brown is deliberately playing his audience for fools. Of course Linus didn't create Linux from tabula rasa. He didn't start with a blank harddrive and manually toggle in hex until he managed to get it booted up to an editor to start typing in Linux source! Duh!

When Linus "used" Minix and GCC, he used them as tools. Is this so hard for Mr. Brown to get through his skull? Apparently so.

Is it likely that a student (Linus Torvalds) with no operating systems experience, a non-Unix licensee, without any use of Minix or Unix source code, could build a functioning kernel in six months

Mr. Brown seems to be making the argument later than Linus couldn't of possibly have written Linux 2.6 in six months. Of course! He came up with version 0.1 instead. Although it was functional, it wasn't terribly useful.

People would take Ken Brown more seriously if he didn't write a book that was nothing more than his attempt to discredit his own erroneous assumtions.

Re:From scratch...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes -- certainly not a line of source code to borrow from, or to be tempted to borrow from.

Ooh, Mr Brown is such a clever man - he's reinvented the STRAW MAN FALLACY! Quick, someone give him another half million in funding, maybe next he'll come up with a way of proving that black is white?

Re:From scratch...

[rkef]

It reminds me of a quote by Carl Sagan:

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

The nature of human achievement depends on each of us "standing on the shoulders of giants".

Linus went to a good university, obviously spent a reprehensible amount of time in front of the computer, and thoroughly read some great books.

Torvalds never claimed to have designed the concept of a Unix-like operating system. "All" he did was implement a minimal kernel, based on the ingenious designs of others. This "6 months" versus "3 years" BS is laughable, but disturbing.

The cat was out of the bag!

Re:From scratch...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember Linus saying in late 1991 or early 1992 that originally his main reference for Linux was the SunOS man pages (because that was what his school was running), and the book "Design of the Unix Operating System" by By Maurice Bach.

If you look at the old behavior of select() in Linux, it is patterned on what the SunOS man pages suggested a future implementation would be like. Sun never implemented the idea, although Linus did.

Re:From scratch...

[yuri benjamin]

People would take Ken Brown more seriously if ...

Unfortunately for us, KB's book is not aimed at intelligent people. It is aimed at Decision Makers. That is what scares me.

Re:From scratch...

[nathanh]

Mr. Brown seems to be making the argument later than Linus couldn't of possibly have written Linux 2.6 in six months. Of course! He came up with version 0.1 instead. Although it was functional, it wasn't terribly useful.

Actually 0.0.1 was the first release and the complexity was entirely realistic for a smart and dedicated student. I'm not sure I could have done it (I'm not that good a coder) but I knew plenty of friends during university who had sufficient skill to write a kernel if they hadn't thought it was too difficult. History is full of people like Linus who don't know it can't be done!

Version 1.0 wasn't until 2.5 years later and already had several 100 contributors by then. But Ken Brown accidentally (purposefully?) confuses Linus's actual first kernel (0.0.1) with the much more complex but community written 1.0 kernel.

Re:From scratch...

[maximilln]

Of course Linus didn't create Linux from tabula rasa

<humor>

He didn't write Linux from scratch, either. Linuxfromscratch is written by Beekmans.

</humour>

His idiocy is his arguement

[michaelggreer]

The guy just keeps repeating over and over his own inability to understand the material, and his amazement at Linus's ability to write the kernel. He has no comprehension of any of the technical issues, and no experience, so it is hardly surprising that the Linux story is so "unbelievable" to him. That he thinks this is a convincing argument is what is truly unbelievable.

From Scratch?

[gnugie]

Ken has a funny definition of "from scratch".

I guess in Ken's mind, in order to bake a cake "from scratch", you couldn't use a cookbook to devise a recipe, would have to grow your own wheat, crush it into flour with your bare hands, add sugar from your own sugar beets, and bake it on a rock in the sun.

Previously, I'd just thought him a shill. This is sheer idiocy.

Re:From Scratch?

[kidgenius]

Well, back in my day, that's how we had to make our cakes, and we couldn't have been happier. You young-ins have it easy these days.

Re:From Scratch?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is intellectual "property" taken to its logical conclusion, yes. Brown says (paraphrased) "how can we trust people who hold intellectual property in such contempt?". I say: "how can you trust someone who doesn't?". Intellectual "property" is the cancer, not the GPL!

Re:From Scratch?

[demon]

I believe a famous research scientist (might've been Einstein?) once said that to make something "from scratch", that "first you must make the universe". Nothing ever occurs in a vacuum, and we get ideas from all sorts of places. Things we hear, things we see, people we talk to. Even things totally unrelated may help to spark an idea. So to say that anything anyone does is completely, totally, 100% unquestionably original is pretty hard to justify. Even Linus admits he was inspired by Unix - that's not a bad thing, even if this Ken Brown character wants to paint it that way.

wondering why people take AdTI seriously

[nomad63]

Haven't we figured that out yet this organization has one goal in mind, which is to spray FUD over open source movement, which we all know funded by a big corp in Redmond ?
More the name gets discussed among the geek squad (a.k.a. /.ers) more publicity they get from the not-so-clever mainstream media, authors of which think "oh, since their name is out there so much, they must have a good point in discussion"
Playing ignoramus against these clowns is the best strategy in my opinion.
These guys are like the talentless idiot who draws Boondocks. Nobody knew neither him nor his strip, until the day he attacked the Sean Hannity in an anti-war interview, where Hannity was absent. The next day, in his program, Hannity chewed him out but he succeeded at his goal. He was known by so many millions of Americans in the course of a few minutes.
Screw AdTI.

Good point with a bad foundation

[lukewarmfusion]

Aside from his rants and the conclusions that lack any logical progression, there is a good point underlying much of his "reasoning." Linux is not an entity, and cannot be held responsible any more than "P2P" can.

This isn't just a legal issue; in order to gain significant market share, earn the trust of potential users, and develop with a strong backbone in a reliable direction, Linux must be accountable. Users have to be able to turn to someone/somewhere for support, for resources, for guidance; because there is no single authority over Linux, many companies and users are uncomfortable with it.

As for the legal issues, we've seen this play out already. SCO claims to own IP, and without a single entity to fight back it has been difficult to put and end to that nonsense. Because there's nobody to sue directly, SCO resorts to picking on individuals/corporations. The RIAA sued Napster, MP3.com, Kazaa, etc. because they put a face to a problem (P2P). While P2P thrives on the "anonymity" factor, Linux does not. This Ken Brown realizes this, perhaps unconsciously, and while he does not attack that directly he does recognize the consequences.

What's the solution? I dunno. But companies like RedHat are a traditional solution - form an entity that can be held responsible, and hope that the rewards are worth it.

Re:Good point with a bad foundation

[Jeremi]

In order to gain significant market share, earn the trust of potential users, and develop with a strong backbone in a reliable direction, Linux must be accountable.

Oh, I don't know... the English language does pretty well without holding anyone "accountable". I think the "who can I sue?" question is, in the long run, a red herring.

Re:Good point with a bad foundation

[SpecBear]

Linux needs to be accountable in the same way proprietary software vendors are in case problems occur. Sounds good. But do you mean accountable the same way that Microsoft is held accountable for buffer overflows or do you mean accountable in the same way Cisco is accountable for putting a backdoor into its routers?

The accountability issue for open source is a red herring. Everyone I know who uses Linux uses a particular distribution from a particular corporation. If you want support, pony up some cash and you'll get it.

As for the IP issue, the "three monkeys" analogy Brown uses fits far better into the closed source development model. How does any software vendor ensure that its developers don't use code they'd kept from their previous employer or downloaded from SourceForge? A closed source company can profit from stolen code, and it would be extremely difficult to prove unless someone does some serious hacking into the executable. IP protection in the proprietary world is a joke.

At least open source products have their code available so that IP violations can be found and corrected. And the open nature of the projects discourage people from trying such shenanigans. I have yet to see any evidence that Linux is more prone to IP violations than any other OS. Of course, it's not like any third party could properly audit Windows anyway.

Re:Good point with a bad foundation

[Anonymous Coward]

The RIAA sued Napster, MP3.com, Kazaa, etc. because they put a face to a problem (P2P)

mp3.com had nothing to do with P2P technology. mp3.com was the center of a star network.

They were not sued by RIAA either, the 5 major music studios sued them and mp3.com settled. Then one of those five, Vivendi/Universal purchased them.

One could argue that mp3.com was just a big warez site (independent artist's content aside).

This Ken Brown book is about one thing: Microsoft trying to protect their criminal monoply.

He is a sock puppet for sale and nothing more.

I hope ESR will publish some material we can get into the hands of government IT managers.

Re:Good point with a bad foundation

[CaptainCarrot]

I'm sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? Have you even read a EULA lately? Sure, I know it's easy to click past it as quickly as you can when it pops up in the installer. But try it sometime. You'll find that the vast majority of them contain language that distances the vendor as much as legally possible from anything like accountability.

Note that this is not the same as "support... resources... guidance." Anyone can provide that. Lots of folks make livings doing this for MS products, many of them without even official certification. It would be absurd to say that Bob, the techie that lives down the street, is in any sense "accountable" for, say, Clippy. No, the only ones who can be accountable in any real sense is MS itself, and it refuses to be so held.

How is this any better than Linux?

Re:Good point with a bad foundation

[fatboy]

This isn't just a legal issue; in order to gain significant market share, earn the trust of potential users, and develop with a strong backbone in a reliable direction, Linux must be accountable.

Linux is accountable. Linux has a copyright holder, his name is Linus Torvalds. The various parts of the Linux kernel subsystems have copyright holders as well. There are too many to list.

This whole, "Linux has no accountability" thing is a SCOism.

Re:Good point with a bad foundation

[mwa]

This isn't just a legal issue; in order to gain significant market share, earn the trust of potential users, and develop with a strong backbone in a reliable direction, Linux must be accountable. Users have to be able to turn to someone/somewhere for support, for resources, for guidance; because there is no single authority over Linux, many companies and users are uncomfortable with it.

This is entirely an economic argument against what Brown is stating. His conclusion is that "hybrid source" will ruin the economics of the software industry.

False. It will ruin the economics of the monopolistic software lock-in business model. It will create a software industry with local support experts with full access to the source code, capable of actually fixing problems instead of reporting them to the vendor and sitting on their hands awaiting a fix. Whether you contract them, or hire them, they are people who live next door and whose next meal depends on keeping you, the customer, happy. That's "accountable". An EULA that disclaims all warranties and liabilities is not.

What bozo's like this fail to realize is that the U.S. economy is driven by small businesses. Collectively, small businesses pay more taxes and employ more people than the Fortune 500 combined.

Real (libre) open source has the potential to kick both the U.S. and global economy in the ass, to such a high gear, that the the gradual disappearance of Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc. wouldn't even be noticed. Custom application of open source components would drive huge productivity gains as people and businesses started to work the way they decide they are most efficient, not the way their applications dictate. Open standards and 100% compatibility would completely eliminate time wasted converting or re-transmitting information. File formats would cease to be an impediment to communications. Open code and full disclosure would strengthen security and eliminate billions in lost productivity to viruses and worms. All those high-tech workers displaced by outsourcing would be able to get off the public dole and become entrepeneurs -- more small businesses supporting other small business

Economic threat, yes. But not to 99% of the population. Only to the very small portion of the population that own proprietary software companies (employees will have whole new vistas of opportunities) that refuse to adapt to a customer-oriented service model. Mr. Browns elaborate propoganda for promoting only "proprietary-friendly" open source software is a thinly veiled argument on behalf of the status-quo.

Re:Good point with a bad foundation

[The Conductor]

How does any software vendor ensure that its developers don't use code they'd kept from their previous employer

This point often gets brought up. Didn't this happen to Claris Draw, where a programmer "took some code with him" from a previous job? I can't google anything on it, but it was offered as a reason why we only had one Mac supporting component drawings at a place I worked. They couldn't get another seat of Claris Draw, but migrating was tough because of the huge library of existing drawings in that format. Proprietary lock-in nearly orphaned a large store of data.

Re:Good point with a bad foundation

[antirename]

Let's avoid using the term "hybrid source". A former head of the company that employs this Brown bozo "coined it". That means he pulled it out of thin air, or his ass, and it could mean anything. Or nothing, which is the case here. By using their buzzwords (which are poorly defined if defined at all) you are playing into their hands.

Ownership of code?

[bstone]

The reality is that, noone, including Linus Torvalds, can ever guarantee that code in the Linux kernel is free of counter ownership, or attribution claims.

And, of course, if you buy software, that does guarantee that it is free of "counter ownership"?

I guess that means that SCO is immediately going to drop their suit against IBM, given this new information.

I am shocked and - yes - ANGRY!

[mkro]

Much of this questionable borrowing is a) not in the best interest U.S. corporations b) not in the best interest of IT workers in America c) at a serious expense to the investment community, an entity betting on the success of intellectual property in the marketplace.

Mr. Brown seems to leave out the ties Linux has to international terrorism, and even fails to mention the negative impact Linux has on the oil price. How are we supposed to take him seriously? Seriously, Microsoft should ask for their money back.

Re:I am shocked and - yes - ANGRY!

[Duhavid]

Hmmm.

Funny, how Ford's, GM's, and many other cars have borrowed ideas from each other, so much so, that automobiles are so much the same as each other.

Televisions,
Clocks,
Printers,
Pictures ( negatives, prints ),
Stoves,
Airplanes,
etc, etc.

If we draw the parallels to these products, shouldnt these various manufacturers have not appropriated each other's ideas? Shouldnt they be extremely distinct? As in whoever put 4 wheels on a car, near the extreme corners of the vehicle would be the only manufacturer allowed to use that idea, for example. I mean, it is questionable to borrow this idea, no? And it is not in the best interests of US Corps, so.... It should stop, right?

Nobody visit the AdTI website!

[Chmarr]

Please... noone visit the AdTI website... we wouldn't want Mr Brown to think that his web site is being attacked again, would we? :)

Re:Nobody visit the AdTI website!

[ncurses]

Hah! That's right, he said it was brought down. /. effect for ya! But seriously, no one buy the book. If you must read it, go to a library.

Re:Nobody visit the AdTI website!

[Anonymous Coward]

noone visit the AdTI website... we wouldn't want Mr Brown to think that his web site is being attacked again,

This is true slahdot mistery: how a site can be slashdotted when almost nobody here RTFA? It bust be some conspiracy behind...

What's the real motive?

[fred fleenblat]

It's entirely possible that Ken Brown is just creating an artificial controvery in order to get AdTI into the headlines and drum up more business for himself.

The crux: Tanenbaum's statement

[nerdb0t]

On March 8, 2004, Professor Tanenbaum sent me the following e-mail:

"MINIX was the base that Linus used to create Linux. He also took many ideas from MINIX, including the file system, source tree, and much more."

this is it. this is the most important statement in the whole freakin big deal. if this is true, then there is a case. if it is not, then it's all bogus.

Re:The crux: Tanenbaum's statement

[The Grey Mouser]

this is it. this is the most important statement in the whole freakin big deal. if this is true, then there is a case. if it is not, then it's all bogus.

Have a look at Tanenbaum's web site, where he discusses this. He believes that the ideas came from MINIX (which is almost certainly true), but is quite convinced that none of the code was stolen (which is the issue at hand).

Cheers,

Mouser

Re:The crux: Tanenbaum's statement

[Anonymous Coward]

the problem is, the corpies are pushing their vision of a world in which the ideas themselves ARE the property. That's not what the law says, but that's what they are trying to say. They are trying to create a truth by repeating it - which _can work_ if it's something purely subjective and human/social with no physical underlay - if enough people start acting like ideas are owned, they are, and we sink into a new Dark Age. Great.

Huh???

[mehaiku]

"Linux is a leprosy"

Leprosy? I thought it was cancer
10 bucks says next it will be herpes.

But as soon as we DO find the sharpest knife

[IshanCaspian]

But as soon as we DO find the sharpest knife, I can guarantee you we'll make sure it gets to him. >:)

Alexis de Tocqueville once observed...

[eggstasy]

Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. So now you know where they got the name. We live in a world of greed and spin, and AdTI is out to make a buck... brainwashing the people... being paid to hide "complex truths" from their view, replacing them with whatever simple lies the people will prefer to believe.
They aren't very original in this respect, but they should be feared rather than scorned.
You never know exactly how many influent people will buy this crap, not to mention the masses.
People cling to silly myths and urban legends for decades!

Re:Alexis de Tocqueville once observed...

[EvilGrin666]

I think Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen did a better job of explaining what they called 'lies to children' in their book, The Science of Discworld. Its a central theme and well worth reading :)

Re:Alexis de Tocqueville once observed...

[superyooser]

Simple lie: "Much code for Linux was stolen, reverse engineered, or illegally copied from proprietary projects and other code was developed independently by Linux developers."

Complex truth: "Linus created Linux."

Re: who is paying him to write this crap?

[bjarvis354]

Here is a bit of speculation. One guess and two don't count.

About Alexis de Tocqueville's rotational velocity

[Linux_ho]

As reported by practically every five-sentence-or-greater biography of the man, Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that "it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth".

Apparently Ken Brown feels it's his duty to test this observation.

Another code borrowing article

[xyote]

here. Not about Linux per se but I'm suprised ADTI hasn't picked up on it and tried to use it to bolster their case.

Re:Another code borrowing article

[meburke]

This is tough, isn't it? Suppose you learn to build GUI's from a specific textbook, along with 200,000 other programmers. You might continue to build GUI's that way from then on, unless you learn something new that's better. But the code is going to be similar in all of them precisely because of the structure of the language! Nobody expects you to learn a new language to solve familiar problems. But even more interesting is that if you use something like Rational Rose, design a solution and then generate the code, the code for similar problems is going to be very similar. Is this "copying code?" Standards in hardware and software practically require that any software developed to exploit the same specific features/stadards/limitations will look pretty much the same. Is this "copying code?. All accounting software works on a set of principles that must be adhered to. Any accounting software I write can have similar features to, say, Great Plains, but I wouldn't consider it "copying" or "infringement" unless the "look feel" was somewhere just short of counterfeiting. It seems to me that this community could help define the limits for ourselves and for the public. The article does not define the limits well enough to be useful.

Re:Another code borrowing article

[Rassendyll]

This is the essential argument against software patents. When software is written for a digital computer, by definition, a machine with a finite number of states, there are only a certain finite number of ways to solve any particular problem that the computer can be programmed to solve. For this reason, I don't believe that any software can be considered to be an "invention" per se. The actual ic chips used to run it may be considered to be invention as well as the techniques used to design and manufacture them, but not the software that runs on them.

A computer is a tool that we manipulate to get the job done. I think that patenting software written to run on any finite computer system is far too similar to the idea of patenting one's hammer swing when one hasn't modified the hammer in any fashion.

Huh?

[Ponkinator]

"The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency which contributes to the worldwide effort to protect and govern intellectual property."

It may have been respected in the past but now with the USPTO issuing patents without proper review I'd say it isn't worthy of respect today. Also, wasn't the intention of patents to give the inventor a 17 year limited period of protection? Its main goal, however, was to have the invention end up in the public domain for the benefit of its citizenship. He doesn't seem to understand that and I'll bet he doen't understand the concept of public schools or libraries either. Ken Brown has a very pueril view of the purpose of goverenment.

and a flaimbait:

[jm.one]

Samizdat concludes that the root of attribution, IP misappropriation, and acknowledgement problems in Linux is ---in fact--- the trust model. Basically, Torvalds and other Linux advocates are admitting to using a 'three monkeys' policy for software development: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. Isn`t this what trolls are tellings all the time? This guy is going to sell a book of this.

Ken's Logical Fallacy

[lakeesis]

One of the things that disturbs me about the originally released material, as well as this rabid little tid-bit, is the reliance that the author has on a classic logical fallacy. His assumptions follow this pattern.

1. many programmers cheat 2. Linus must have cheated

I may be just an English graduate, but there's a basic problem with this pattern. In an essay of even dubious academic merit, an author would be required to fill in several steps before claiming either of these conclusions. Rather, the author of this article relies on the assumption [again] that if everyone says:

1. average programmers can only write so fast 2. Linus must write at the same [or slower] speed without help

If you want to make a scholarly paper, book, pamphlet or press release about a certain subject, it is probably better to not rely on "he-said she-said" arguements - or accuse the very movement spawned by the subject to be like a disease. Some may argue that you show a lack of perspective.

AdTI and the other paid 'Think Tanks'...

[Vancouverite]

... would be the subject of some national investigative news show, if I had my wish come true. Just think... national, prime-time coverage of how, if you have enough money, you can get a "highly respected conservative/liberal/defense/technology think tank" to say pretty much whatever you want them to.

Perhaps, just perhaps, this would lead to more critical examination of the 'studies' coming out of all of the think tanks....

[I wish]

Re:AdTI and the other paid 'Think Tanks'...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps, just perhaps, this would lead to more critical examination of the 'studies' coming out of all of the think tanks....

Nah, they'd just say it proved once again the liberal bias in the media...

This IS dangerous stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

not because of the ridiculous claims about Linux's origin. That doesn't matter.
The problem is that these guys are a US conservative think tank.
And what these guys spread today might be tomorrow's legislation.
The dangerous point in their argumentation, which is not based on rubbish, is that they extend the definition of intellectual property from the work, i.e. the code - which is covered by copyright, to the ideas and logic behind the work.
If put into laws this implies protection of ideas via a copyright mechanism. So instead of a patent process with limited lifespan, checking by a more or less competent agency and disclosure we get a virtually forever lasting, unverified and undisclosed protection of ideas.
Furthermore their interpretation is much more far reaching than the patent principle itself:
a patent is limited to the written description of the patent office. But by their interpretation any similar work
would be crushed by IP protection.
And yes this stuff might be put into laws someday.
Some people would say now "Bush is not all that stupid" or "Kerry is going to 0wnz0r Bush".
But most US politicians might follow this path in some years:
In the last decade the pool of competitors to the US research and innovation was pretty limited: Europe and Japan. Russia was behind the iron curtain and after that it was pretty fucked.
But now China and India are rising. Europe is growing by countries with cheap and good research/IT workers. Russia is moving upwards again.
So facing this growing competition together with economical problems in their own country US politician might really considers to implement such broad "IP" interpretation just for protectionistic reasons.

I'm not even going to try

[3rdParty]

to dispute points made by Ken Brown. The AdTI is nothing more than a conservative "think tank," which means they come up with ideas, some of which, or all, are not worth the paper they are printed on.

Devoting any time to dispute the Brown POS is foolish, given the place it comes rom. One needs to merely read a few paragraphs to determine that the writers have no interest in the truth, but see themselves as some sort of policy makers, twisting facts and making unsupported statements purely for the benefit of what they see as "their" society. A little too much Socrates, and not enough hemlock, I think.

This is dangerous

[Rams�s Morales]

This book is intentionally filled with lies. Knowledgeable people know that, but politicians are not knowledgeable, and they don't care.

If we are not carefull, Linux could be banned from the US, just like ephedra and pro-hormones were banned based on lies and pseudoscience.

Re:This is dangerous

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed this is dangerous. We've done even more than ban softare on similar grounds.

Restaurants?!?

[Halueth]

Kenneth Brown is president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution and director of its technology research programs. He is the author of numerous research papers and popular articles on technology issues, including the 2002 report, "Opening the open-source debate," one of the first papers to raise serious questions about the security of open- and hybrid-source computer software, a point recently raised by the president of Symantec Corporation. He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer," but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people, and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world. The last sentence is worth a million! What an incredible moron...

This is the *lamest* reply ever

[theefer]

I've never read such a plain dumb reply, it's really amazing ... Here are a few pieces :

Meanwhile, an associate of mine asked Richard Stallman, who started with the Mach Kernel, why his GNU team could not build a kernel as fast as Torvalds. Mr. Stallman provided AdTI with a credible, believable set of reasons why building a kernel was not a simple task.

It is not trivial, but neither really that hard. The reason why GNU/Hurd takes so long is that coding micro-kernels is hard (and so said AT in his own replies on this topic). I guess RMS' quote might have been tricked from "building a micro-kernel" to "building a kernel".

But recently in a ZDNet interview last month, Torvalds insisted that he didn't start with Minix, but did get ideas from Unix(7).

Maybe Ken Brown isn't even aware that Minix is a micro-kernel, and thus a completely different architecture from a monolithic kernel. Does he even know the difference ?

Coincidently in a recent interview, Linus decided he was not the inventor of Linux commenting in a ZDNet story, "I'd agree that 'inventor' is not necessarily the right word...(9)"

This is a vocabulary issue. He's obviously not saying he's not the author of Linux, as Brown wants us to extrapolate.

Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry

Didn't he mean that Linux is the cancer of the software industry ? Reminds me from something ...

Ken Brown's article is really, really lame, filled with wrong arguments, misquotes and lies. He's really trying to burn the latest tiny pieces of respect someone could hold for him.

Re:This is the *lamest* reply ever

[Pseudonym]

Coincidently in a recent interview, Linus decided he was not the inventor of Linux commenting in a ZDNet story, "I'd agree that 'inventor' is not necessarily the right word...(9)"

I love that quote too. If you had asked Brunel if he was the "inventor" of the Great Eastern, or asked John and Washington Roebling if they were the "inventors" of the Brooklyn Bridge, they would have said "no".

Great works of engineering are rarely "inventions" in the USPTO sense of the word.

My God! It's full of fallacies.

[Flower]

Like a GPL project can't be developed with tracked source contributions or that a BSD project could not misappropriate commercial code. Hybrid Source is such a misnomer that it isn't even funny. If you have misappropriated proprietary code into a GPL'd product it is no longer GPL'd.

It just goes on and on. I could write a frickin' paper on this if only I had the time.

Re:My God! It's full of fallacies.

[Brandybuck]

If you have misappropriated proprietary code into a GPL'd product it is no longer GPL'd.

By the strict definition, any software that has a copyright is "proprietary". The FSF just used the wrong word when the wanted a label for a certain class of software. The CSRG word of "encumbered" is much closer to what is meant.

A good thing to do

[GedConk]

Would be to pass the word around the whole programming community (OSS but also all "famous" programmers, which should not be that hard considering that they now know whatever they say will be distorted to suit Brown's view) not to give interviews to anyone affiliated to the AdTI, or respond to their emails. If we can't keep them from trolling, we can at least NOT feed them.

Interest of US Corporations

[Malc]

"Much of this questionable borrowing is a) not in the best interest U.S. corporation"

The bad grammar aside, I don't see how this computes. Perhaps Linux isn't in the best interests of the biased software corporations funding Ken Brown... but it is in the interests of US corporations purchasing software!

Ugh! Is this slashdot or c-span?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I cared about politics I would be watching CNN or C-SPAN, this is REALLY getting old. Who gives a flying pig what some no-name says about Linux. Take your arguments to some BBS, and keep it off of Slashdot.

Thank you,
The Anonymous Brave Warrior...

Don't worry, this guy is experienced

[etnoy]

"It would be skewed and bias to only quote people that are anti-Linux or anti-open source. I have done this for years, and will continue to do so, " regardless of what a source thinks of my theories."

Hm. Keep the tounge right in the mouth next time you type something on that keyboard. And, also, don't continue what you have done for years.

Profit!!!

[wtom]

1. Observe thousands of geeks rage-filled reaction to SCO Linux IP claims. 2. Write poorly-researched, inflammatory book claiming Linus the Chosen One did not, in fact write the Linux kernel. 3. Thousands and thousands and thousands of pissed-off Linux zealots buy said book, in order to debunk it, burn it, sit it on the shelf and laugh at it, whatever... 4. Profit!!! I think the author probably saw an exploitable reaction in the Linux community and wrote this book in order to, um, exploit it... I wonder if the same strategy would work in other formats? I could write a book called "Eating Puppies", do the talk show circuit, and as long as I was not shot or something, the book would sell a million copies! I'm a genius! *starts typing up first draft*

Re:Profit!!!

[peeping_Thomist]

Thousands and thousands and thousands of pissed-off Linux zealots buy said book

Too bad it's not available through legitimate bookstores, because it is published through a vanity press and not through a real publisher.

Brown is an imbletard

[The Lynxpro]

I want to highlight some of Brown's flawed logic:

"The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source."

Interesting, his choice of BSD, considering that Microsoft has used BSD code in Windows before. Getting the U.S. government to pay for research that will benefit Microsoft ($60 billion in the bank) is nothing short of corporate welfare, especially when said corporation pays so little tax to the U.S. Government with the exception of campaign contributions for the Capitol Hill gang.

Then the author (similar to SCO) shoots his own foot with the following statement:

"The disturbing reality is that the hybrid source model depends heavily upon sponging talent from U.S. corporations and/or U.S. proprietary software."

How is the *hybrid source* of Linux being more of a sponge than BSD? Linux requires the community to give back improvements so the entire Linux community profits. Anyone can use BSD without giving anything back (thankfully some companies like Apple do, and unlike MSFT). So how does BSD get a free sponging pass in this guy's logic?

So I propose that Brown (in my opinion) is an imbletard. That is the byproduct of a union between an imbecile and a retard.

Re:Brown is an imbletard

[The Lynxpro]

And to further my point regaring Mr Brown:

"He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer," but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people, and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world."

Was that last comment meant to be funny or witty? Being accepted at "fine restaurants and hotels around the world" has nothing to do with ones intelligence, only liquid capital (mainly) and connections.

Even better:

"one of the first papers to raise serious questions about the security of open- and hybrid-source computer software, a point recently raised by the president of Symantec Corporation."

Oooh, Symantec raised a red flag over open source software, especially after open source based firewalls have shown up Norton Firewall so much. That would be like Star Trek producer Rick Berman critiquing George Lucas on the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy.

I stand by my prior statement, the guy is an imbletard (imho).

Re:Brown is an imbletard

[Anonymous Coward]

"He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer," but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people, and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world."

Was that last comment meant to be funny or witty?

Of course, it's a joke. That's the standard line used to promote credit cards. Sheesh.

And really, aren't there enough insulting words in the English language that you don't have to make up your own? "Imbletard", omgwtf I'm absolutely devastated.

Re:Brown is an imbletard

[flacco]

He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer," but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people...

all of whom conclude their evil little conversations with him with the phrase "...now go do as you're told, of soulless, obsequious little whore."

Re:Brown is an imbletard

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, I will change the last sequence to:

"He is an imbetard, but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people, and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world."

Brown

Re:Brown is an imbletard

[silicon not in the v]

"The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source."

Interesting, his choice of BSD, considering that Microsoft has used BSD code in Windows before. Getting the U.S. government to pay for research that will benefit Microsoft ($60 billion in the bank) is nothing short of corporate welfare, especially when said corporation pays so little tax to the U.S. Government with the exception of campaign contributions for the Capitol Hill gang.

Then the author (similar to SCO) shoots his own foot with the following statement:

"The disturbing reality is that the hybrid source model depends heavily upon sponging talent from U.S. corporations and/or U.S. proprietary software."

How is the *hybrid source* of Linux being more of a sponge than BSD? Linux requires the community to give back improvements so the entire Linux community profits. Anyone can use BSD without giving anything back (thankfully some companies like Apple do, and unlike MSFT). So how does BSD get a free sponging pass in this guy's logic?

Ken tries a subtle technique to discredit Linux, by hiding the difference between code writing process vs. publication license. Very early in the article, he says, "Its purpose is to provide U.S. leadership with a researched presentation on attribution and intellectual property problems with the hybrid source code model, particularly Linux." In just a quick phrase--"including Linux"--he implies that Linux uses a "hybrid source code model", which he defines later as combining stolen proprietary code with original code. That is a completely false statement that Linux was developed using this hybrid model. However, now that he has slipped in that association, he can now (rightly) criticize the hybrid model as being unethical, and we have to agree somewhat. People in the know about Linux' code writing process will understand that Linux has dropped from the discussion when he began talking about the hybrid source code model, but he is counting on the less-informed to be nodding along, unaware that he's not really talking about Linux anymore.

As to your reply on his "sponging" comment, you misunderstand what he meant. He is referring to the creation of code using the hybrid source model he has been talking about, which incorporates illegally obtained proprietary code. That does include an aspect of "sponging" off of someone else's talent. By giving only two choices--BSD and similar style licenses or "hybrid source", he has created a false dichotomy. Linux is not published under a BSD-style license, so...what? It's created with hybrid source? He is trying to promote this idea that only BSD style licensing, where you can copy/take/hide/etc. is truly free, and the GPL, with its additional restrictions is not free.

I also see the goal they are shooting for with that. Being funded by Microsoft, they are not in favor of all source code to be proprietary. Rather, he mentions they should push for "open source" code in the form of BSD style so that it can be incorporated and used in MS closed-source products, as allowed in the BSD license. They are trying to gain benefit by having others do their work for them and legally picking the fruit.

Dear Dave,

[ebbomega]

If you're going to be a grammar nazi, don't forget the "r" in Loser.

Thanks,
Me.

This rested the case for me

[Phelan]

Disinfopedia article on Alexis De Tocqueville Institution Reading that kinda puts it all into perspective

Based on a misquote?

[bw5353]

Brown quotes Tanenbaum as writing in an e-mail: "MINIX was the base that Linus used to create Linux."

There is no reason to doubt that Tanenbaum wrote that. However, what he surely meant was mainly that the OS that Linus used to develop on was Minix. To infer that this means some automatic heritage, as Brown does, is about as bright as claiming that Harry Potter would be based on Windows, if Rowling uses a word processor under XP.

Uhh... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

The disturbing reality is that the hybrid source model depends heavily upon sponging talent from U.S. corporations and/or U.S. proprietary software. Much of this questionable borrowing is a) not in the best interest U.S. corporations b) not in the best interest of IT workers in America c) at a serious expense to the investment community, an entity betting on the success of intellectual property in the marketplace.

Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector.

It looks to me like he doesn't "address" his critics at all in this, anywhere. He just restates his thesis and then says "some people dispute my thesis. However, this is incorrect because: THEY ARE WRONG".

I just kind of skimmed this, but does he actually do anything to address the mountain of valid criticism against him, or is this actually just more of what it looks like, more uninformed blathering by a man who was paid by Microsoft to attack Microsoft's opponents?

One more reason to distrust AdTI

[andrewagill]

The update page for Samizdat includes the following:

attachments, &tc.

As anyone familliar with typesetting and Latin can tell you, the ampersand is actually a ligature for the Latin digraph et (examples of ampersands can be found here). As such, the proper abbreviation for et cetera, etc., should be rendered as &c.

&tc. would expand to the nonsense et tcetera. You just can't trust AdTI!

More importantly

[Anonymous Coward]

Who is going to pierce the veil in the public's mind to make people realize that this is NOT an independent institute, that the institute has compromised its objectivity in the most extreme way possible, and this book is a product paid for by Microsoft?

And that statements like "Linux is a leprosy" are NOT coming from a public policy think tank, they are coming from a paid representative of Microsoft?

Through the looking glass ...

[DarthBobo]

It strikes me that you could reverse the words "proprietary" and "open" throughout the entire screed and it would make as much sense.

It seems highly unlikely that the programmers that wrote Windows NT did so without references to UNIX, books on UNIX, or other materials. It seems even less likely that they had never worked on UNIX machines. Yet our friend would give them a pass because their source is closed ...

Re:Through the looking glass ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true, but I have no mod points.
Anyway, there is a lot more of VMS in NT than Microsoft would care to admit.
A few bits that I'd thought long lost crop up in Longhorn too, thank god, it may well turn out to be quite a nice OS.
Including a little bit of compatiblility code for us Irish sys admins!
The world of OSs is older and stranger than most would imagine. (Unless you've been maintaining a mix of VMS and NT for the government for the last five years :)

Re:What a hatchet job

[Faies]

From the info snippet at the bottom of Brown's response: [Ken Brown] is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer," but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people, and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world.

Well, doesn't that just say it?

Hilarious!!

[joebolte]

This shit is hilarious! I love the phrasing Brown uses and the responses by Richie. I am just going to keep replying to myself posting all the funniest bits. This is literally one of the most entertaining things I have read ina long time. It's like watching Jerry Springer. There, but for the grace of God go I.

Okay first two

Brown's page:
The GNU team only asked that the product be called GNU/Linux, a very simple request for helping to make him famous. But Torvalds silently, but deliberately let the naming idea die.

Oh No! Linus SBD's GNU/Linux!

Q: Have you ever discussed the Minix/Linux migration or any other topic with Professor Tannenbaum in Finland? What are your thoughts about his decision to create Minix based on Unix, regardless of the efforts by ATT to restrict its use?

A:Since you've visited him, you know that Andrew Tanenbaum was and is at VU in Amsterdam.

So, Here's The Problem With Ignoring This Guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, it's obvious that Ken Brown is out to do a hatchet job on Linus and Linux. Can you blame Microsoft? They have a tremendous market position and cash hoard. Why take any risk whatsoever? Spend some of your damn money to put this genie back into the bottle.

Realize that we haven't seen *ANYTHING* yet. Just imagine the death throes of one of the most profitable companies that every existed. EXPECT character assassination. EXPECT lobbying. EXPECT fronts like SCO. EXPECT software patenting and litigation. EXPECT FUD books, FUD articles, and FUD conferences.

The best thing the open source community can do is to be as squeaky clean as it can be. Open source legal teams need to be formed to independently review code carefully for patent infringement and at least be aware of the problem. Better yet, either remove the risky code or break it off into a separate module. Patent law will kill open source companies if Microsoft prepares a mega-case that only the likes of an IBM can take on.

The other approach is to have Microsoft's customer's throw down the gauntlet. "Either back off of our open source alternative or get the hell off of our servers and desktops. We won't be bullied." Once real business starts walking out the door, Microsoft will have to back down. It's probably the only thing that's prevented them from getting more aggressive up till now.

Because the Editors want pageviews.

[Anonymous Coward]

A succinct summary of the story (really, there is nothing further to be said) might keep people from wasting time with this moron. And this is bad for business. Hence, "offtopic."

Ignore it! (Yeah, right)

[tji]

I know this is asking the impossible, but the best thing to do with this crap is to ignore it.

He is obviously a FUD merchant, paid to create a report where the conclusion was already stipulated before the "research" began. He quotes out of context, uses heavy innuendo, and draws unfounded conclusions. The only possible goal with this trash is to get more publicity - creating more doubt about Linux.

So, the best thing would be to ignore the thing, so few people are ever exposed to it (which would have been the best thing for the SCO crap too). But, I know there is virtually no way that will happen.

Pfff ....

[gustgr]

This man [Brown] doesn't deserve a single comment.

Actually, no.

[mcc]

Minux was a model operating system included with a textbook on operating system design.

Linus, since he was trying to make a "UNIX-like" operating system and definitely owned a copy of that textbook (since he owned a copy of Minux and used it to compile the early Linux versions on), almost certainly took ideas from this textbook; and, thus, from Minux (since that's what the textbook was about). Assuming he read it.

But that doesn't mean that anything illegal, bad, or "case" worthy came in. I mean... if this is true, it means.. that Linus took ideas from a college textbook. Oh gee, people taking IDEAS from TEXTBOOKS?? WHAT'S NEXT??

as predicted...

[pedantic bore]

Do I get a prize for predicting this Slashdot story?. Nah, I just get to read it again...

The fact that Brown is an idiot isn't news, and hasn't been for a while. We don't need Linus, Andy, RMS, or DR to tell us. Move along, now.

Linus could easily sue in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

If the ADTI book appears in the UK then Linus could sue for libel. It's quite clear that the book contains lies, libels Linus outrageously, and that the libel is malicious. Heck, even in the US he could sue given that its deliberate malcious falsehood.

define:samizdat

[fmileto]

samizdat underground press -- (a system of clandestine printing and distribution of dissident or banned literature)"

my email to Ken Brown

[adric]

Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 17:08:44 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Re: Brown replies -- Samizdat
To: kenbrown@adti.net

The one and only truth which has become apparent is that you're clearly pushing an agenda, with absolutely no regard for the truth. On the plus side, you've got the most obvious case of paid-shillery which I've ever encountered... a fourth-grader could have written a more plausible "study".

As far as I'm concerned, neither you nor AdTI have any credibility (not to mention integrity) whatsoever. I'll be quite happy to point out the numerous flaws, should I encounter anyone naive enough to believe this was a serious study. Fortunately for me, you've made this almost mind-numbingly simple.

Lions book on V6 UNIX

[murr]

One of the many things that Brown ignores is that the question whether Linus had a copy of the Lions book is entirely irrelevant. The book is a historical gem, but the hardware it targets and the programming language used (an utterly archaic and fairly anarchic dialect of C) are so far removed from PC hardware and ANSI C that it's pretty much impossible to learn anything from it about OS design.

Tanenbaum's Minix book is obviously much better suited to learning about operating systems, but the book was always legal and learning concepts from it was never illegal (there are plenty of atrocities in copyright law, but making students licensees of textbook publishers luckily isn't among them -- yet).

Re:Lions book on V6 UNIX

[yuri benjamin]

there are plenty of atrocities in copyright law, but making students licensees of textbook publishers luckily isn't among them -- yet

Yet ...

Re:Lions book on V6 UNIX

[boots@work]

Brown clearly doesn't know his arse from his elbow. I'm sure people tried to explain that point but he didn't understand it.

Re:Lions book on V6 UNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

Spot on. Also worth mentioning that Maurice Bach's book on Unix and the book on 4.3 BSD by McCusick et al had been in print for several years prior to Linux 0.1.

Re:So, Here's The Problem With Ignoring This Guy..

[peeping_Thomist]

MOD PARENT UP!!!

Just take him outside...

[Anonymous Coward]

...and beat some sense into Ken Brown will ya?

Brown's Premise-anti freedom, anti property rights

[fatray]

Aside from his ad hominem attack on Linus Torvalds, what Brown has to say is that nonrestrictive OS licenses are good (e.g. BSD), closed source is good, but GPL is bad. The reason that GPL is bad is because people are stealing code and contributing it to GPL projects, making the result "hybrid" code.

This implies that it is OK for someone to steal proprietary code and contribute it to BSD. (Same for stealing code and contributing it to a closed source project??) Stealing code is bad, regardless of where it might be contributed.

Brown calls Linux (meaning GPL) a leprosy; Microsoft calls it a virial operating system. I think the thing that these critics miss is FREEDOM and OWNERSHIP (of private property). Freedom and private property are two important factors in making the US an economic powerhouse. If you write software it is yours to dispose of as you please. You are free to copywrite it and then distribute it under the licence of your choice.

If this is not defamation, then what is?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would some U.S. lawyer please explain how one could even possibly construe the use of words like these...

rabidly pro-Linux developers

hybrid source code model, particularly Linux

The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time.

Linux is a leprosy

Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property?

...not to be defamation?!

The late Mr. Toqueville would roll in his grave..

[Eggplant62]

if he could read the absolute shite that Brown is spewing from his asshole. From what I've seen of that response, the cheeky bastard thinks that it's high comedy to slander Torvalds and misquote Tanenbaum. Warn the American government about "hybrid source" software??? Right. They already know: It works much better than the closed source model.

To wit: Open Source and Viruses, which I'm certain will receive much attention on Slashdot very soon.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What wasn't said....

[Handpaper]

What struck me most about Ken's rant was the absence of any mention of the GPL. The GNU project got a few words, but concerning what is arguably its most important creation, nothing.
Instead, we have lots of blathering about 'hybrid source', implying that parts of the code are free and open (BSD-style open) and other parts are either closed, stolen, or both.
This is nothing short of libel, IMHO, and OSDL if not Linus himself should be looking for a public retraction or, failing that, an libel lawyer. The GNU project has similar grounds for complaint, and plenty of legal brains at the FSF to back it up.

Ignoring this idiot's rantings will do the open-source community no good at all, forcing him to put up or shut up in open court will help immensely.

This reminds me of the book "The 48 Laws of Power"

[coopaq]

The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source.

There is an excellent example in the book where PT Barnum defeats his competition by embracing them and debunking them at the same time.

In PT Barnums case he was losing audience to a Hypnotist across town. So PT Barnum got his own Hypnotist, but instead of amazing everyone he had the subject break out of hynpnosis and claim it is fake. Thus everyone stopped believing in hypnosis and came back to watch the monkeys.

In Brown's case he is recommending the US invest $5 billion in FreeBSD and such while at the same time claiming open source is bad.

The contradiction is obvious as is his false embrace of anything open sourced.

"Use the surrender Tactic." - Robert Greene

Nope

[mcc]

I'm sorry, but that should be "GNU/X". If X is a part of "The GNU System", then we have to give credit to GNU by calling it "GNU/X".

We can do whatever we want. And if the GNU project didn't want their code to be used without that sort of titular attribution, then they shouldn't have released it under the GPL.

BA-DUM CHING!

College OS Classes

[gustgr]

Have Brown ever been at a comp. sci. class ? Specifically at an operating systems class ?

I am getting the 5th semester of computer science. Next semester we will going to have the class "Operating Sytems II". In this [5th] semester we are studying the theorical concepts of operating system (based upon Tanenbaum's books). Until the end of the next semester we will have to build a simple but working monolithic unix based kernel.

I know it is pretty diff from the time Linux was written (now we have dozens of unix based systems and a lot of free software around), but if a regular 19 year old student can write a working but simple kernel in 6-8 months, why the heck couldn't Linus write a unix monolithic kernel in 6 months ? He is a brilliant programmer, he had time avaliable, he was focused, he didn't have a girlfriend (just kiddin) ...

Ken Brown doesn't have any idea of what he is talking about. We should just ignore him.

Re:From scratch...the reality.

[meburke]

"From scratch" is an undefined phrase with no real meaning. All invention is based on some previously-discovered principles. In fact, there is a discipline (TRIZ) that exploits this to reduce the time necessary to produce new inventions. If you calculate data to a new conclusion, no one will say it's not your work simply because the method (arithmetic) and the tools (numbers) were defined or discovered in the past. If you tell a good story, you are given credit for your efforts unless you actually use the exact same words of another storyteller. I doubt that Linus invented any new programming methodology, but using the common tools of the trade he certainly seems to have produced a unique product and deserves the credit for his efforts. Improvements since then have been well-attributed to the people responsible.

Weird phrase

[ProudClod]

"[Brown] is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world."

My God, MasterCard can WRITE BOOKS?

Herpes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just go all out and jump to AIDS?

My email to Ken Brown

[theolein]

I just read your answer to the criticisms of your so called samizdat series (so called because the word samizdat as used in your title is a very warped and twisted version of the original sense of samizdat which was a distribution of underground news under an oppressive regime). I was completely bowled over.

Some quotes and repsonses:

"'Hybrid source code' is a phrase coined by former Tocqueville Chairman Gregory Fossedal. The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time."

This reminds me for all the world of Darl McBride of SCO infamy. His public screamings to the media over the GPl as being anti-american and unconstitutional before finally being ordered by the court to tone down his public speaking. And you know the direction in which SCO is going, don't you? He has backed away from his attempts to portray the GPL as being illiegal, and with good reason, because the GPL is enforcable, and you might want to ask IBM about this before you publish your book.

"Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector. Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well."

Mmmm, I seem to remember a man called Munide from a company called Microsoft calling Linux and the GPL a cancer a few years ago. I wonder why this reminds me of that?

" In a controversial section of Samizdat, I ask readers to pose some very hard questions about the origin of the Linux kernel. This is for a number of reasons, but especially because the same people that are selling the trust model cannot answer basic questions about what attribution, acknowledgement, and IP credit they may have owed ATT Corporation and/or Prentice Hall Corporation in 1991 when the Linux kernel was introduced. The same community that sells 'trust', is the same community that celebrates: the theft of ATT Unix source code in the late 70's, joked about the theft of Windows source code in February, and commenting on the Cisco source code theft in May wrote in Newsforge, "maybe the theft will be a good enough reason for Cisco customers to check out open source alternatives....(3)"

Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property? Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?"

This is possibly the most ironical piece in the entire post. Not only is the origin of Linux being proven in court right now, in the cases between SCO, IBM, Red hat and Novell, but for a supposedly serious piece to start calling the ethics of the creators into question when the ethics of a company such as microsoft have been judged in court to have been less than stellar is a fine piece of irony. Andy Tannenbaum has written that your claim that Linus Torvalds stole the Kernel from him was false, and the whole SCO controversy has shown that Linux has an OPEN record when it comes to its sources. Can the same be said for Microsoft? Can anyone prove that? NO, I didn't think so.

In fact this whole so called samizdat series has so little in the way of concrete facts that calling it a study is like calling the national Enquirer a serious newspaper.

Considering the extremesimilarity between this study and the Microsoft sponsored attempts to discredit Linux and the GPL, I have only one question:

How much did Microsoft pay?

Re:What a hatchet job

[murr]

[Ken Brown] is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world.

As anybody who has seen _Pretty Woman_ knows, a high limit credit card will get a whore into lots of places.

Defamation/Libel?

[Vengie]

Does anyone know why Linus hasn't sued? He'd get ESR, RMS, Tanenbaum and a slew of others that would be ready to testify in a split second. And for the record, the only reason Microsoft still stands is because typically, ESR and RMS are slightly at odds, if not fully orthogonal to one another. When they team up, it is a scary sight indeed.

Re:Defamation/Libel?

[Rick Zeman]

Does anyone know why Linus hasn't sued? He'd get ESR, RMS, Tanenbaum and a slew of others that would be ready to testify in a split second. And for the record, the only reason Microsoft still stands is because typically, ESR and RMS are slightly at odds, if not fully orthogonal to one another.

Linus' attitude reminds me of a scene from Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead where Ellsworth Toohey speaks to Howard Roark for the first time after trying to bring him down: (quote's close, but may not be exact cuz I'm doing this from memory):

"So what do you think of me now, Mr. Roark?"
"But I don't think of you."

Re:Defamation/Libel?

[The Conductor]

I liked that line, too. By not writing in any antagonism, Ayn Rand starkly illustrated Roark's singular purpose of mind.

For those unfamilliar with the story, Roark is the archetypal creator, a competent & pioneering architect who is unswayed by shallow stylistic fads. Toohey is a parasite; his influence is entirely from being a critic who appeals to the basest of popular tastes (he himself has created nothing), and he uses his influence to impede progress in architecture.

Only /.'ers

[segfault_0]

This man has all but admitted he has no information saying Linus didn't write Linux, he assumes he didn't cause it doesn't seem likely. Would anyone who really read this take that to heart? People already have their minds made up and this document wont sway many people either way. Sometimes i think only /.'ers make anything of this mans comments at all. Funny how that works huh?

Mixing the issues

[Frenchy_2001]

This answer is actually quite interesting. In it Ken Brown mix all the issues to light favorably his own agenda. The omissions and the bias of the author are probably even more interesting that what he writes.
- he values software only as a mean to make MONEY (and only money, no common good, progress or anything else). Of course, free software (a la GPL) runs against this when BSD-type licenses allow for commercial interest to take off from it.
- he speaks of trust but of course avoid to talk about the same subject for commercial software. Worse, he implies that commercial software (hence close sourced and unverifiable) is a better source of trust than open software.
- he mixes the GLP community with the hacker community.
- he sees confusion where there is none (Tanenbaum's account of early Linux Kernels)
- he seems to be of the idea that "from scratch" means leaving in a bubble and having benefited of no advancement done before.

Basically, if KB consider Linux like a cave man that should come out with the Linux kernel directly, sure, there is something wrong. Now, we know he had Minix (he is using the same file system and some other parts) and read some other UNIX specifications. How surprising is it after that?

If KB's big discovery is that Linus had the "help" of other people writing similar software and documenting them (even going so far as giving a class on it for Tanenbaum), then it is already beating on a dead horse. But i guess that for such a limited mind, cooperation is a new idea...

Can someone explain why ...

[zymano]

Why all the attacks are happening now on Linux?

Is this all about greed and fame ? I think so.

Re:Can someone explain why ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Linux is becoming popular, like Windows.
The higher the tree the more wind it will get.

Re:Can someone explain why ...

[Bob Davis, Retired]

No, the goal of this book was to create a twisted version of history that completely distorted the facts. The author and his nefarious project have been outed for what they are - prostitutes. Bought and paid by SCO, Microsoft, and probably Sun, they play the game.

They're losing.

Re:Can someone explain why ...

[Gilmoure]

I think there's a TLA for this: FUD.

Re:What a hatchet job

[swillden]

I mean...when Dr. Tanenbaum comes right out and says "Well, while I don't approve of Linus adding tons of functionality to Linux, because I'm a minimalist, I will say that Linus didn't steal any of my source code", and yet, Brown completely disregards Dr. Tanenbaum's answer, you know the guy is hardly a credible author.

The thing that jumped out at me when I read Brown's little diatribe is that the man loves to rave about intellectual property, but clearly has no understanding of IP law.

A few examples.

Specifically, Torvalds and the Linux kernel management team accept blind source code contributions. Then, they ask for a certification. But the certification does not hold the contributor, the Linux community, or Torvalds legally accountable. Nor does it guarantee that the source is produced in a 'clean room'.

Where to begin?

In the first place, the certification doesn't have to hold anyone accountable, because the *law* does that. If I contribute code that I don't have a right to contribute, I'm violating someone's copyrights and can be sued for my lawbreaking. The point of Linus' new patch labelling process is to make it easier to automate the tracking of who contributes what and, incidentally, to make sure contributors understand that they must have the legal right to contribute. The contributions can be tracked with or without the labels, and the contributors *are* liable under the law, with or without the certificate statement, but Linus' changes help to make sure that everybody's clear on how things are.

Second, what's the crap about 'clean rooms'? "Clean room reverse engineering" is an unnecessary, even silly process. The only reason it was invented was because Compaq's lawyers wanted to make absolutely and completely certain that IBM's lawyers wouldn't have any way to complain about Compaq's version of IBM's PC BIOS. Legally, the Compaq engineers could have studied the IBM BIOS, put it away and written their code and been in the clear. The whole "virgin programmer" nonsense was just overkill to make it utterly and completely clear that a lawsuit would fail.

But I think Brown actually *believes* in the contamination theory of IP.

the same people that are selling the trust model cannot answer basic questions about what attribution, acknowledgement, and IP credit they may have owed ATT Corporation and/or Prentice Hall Corporation in 1991 when the Linux kernel was introduced

Here Brown is talking about attribution, acknowledgement and credit, and implying that they matter. While it's nice and it's polite to acknowledge your inspirations, this sort of relationship between works has no legal force whatsoever. Just because your favorite band idolized Jimi Hendrix when they were kids does not mean they owe any money or control of their music to his estate, unless they actually use his music or his lyrics.

Lots of people get irritated with RMS' refusal to use the term "Intellectual Property" but you know what? He's RIGHT. Talking about IP as though it's some amorphous set of property rights that mysteriously rub off on anything that is influenced or inspired by something else is a fantastic way to build FUD, to concoct ridiculous theories that lead to all software being owned by Microsoft, or to just plain confuse people.

Interesting self-description...

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

From the bottom of the article:

He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer,"
I think we knew that already.

but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people,
And this gives him credentials how? "Converse" does not necessarily mean "understand". And why the "many" qualifier? I would hope (language problems barred) that he would be able to converse with all people, intelligent or not.

and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world.
That shows real credibility for writing a report on kernel authoring. Fancy hotels let him in.

Why did he allow this to be printed? If anything, it discredits him by showing a lack of good reasons for his credibility.

While I'm at it, from the front page, emphasis mine:

Experts from Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds
I thought he didn't get to talk to Linus, no matter if he tried or not?

agree: a. they are much smarter than AdTI's Kenneth Brown,
He allows himself to be called not the sharpest knife in the drawer. That shows a lack of even a blade. Besides, why can't he go write his own kernel and sell it commercially? And they're experts; they're smarter in the field than non-experts.

b. IBM is good, Microsoft is evil,
Appeal to distaste of moral absolutes. I think we can all, including Mr. Brown, agree that Microsoft has been convicted of anticompetitive practices and campaigns against Linux, and IBM supports Linux and is therefore good for Linux. Anyway, how is this against Ken Brown...unless Microsoft in fact supports AdTI?

and c. Brown's theory of how Linux was probably written is dead wrong.
I for one cannot see how if Torvalds, Tanenbaum, and everyone else involved, who are "experts", claim one story of Linux's evolution, Ken Brown, an outsider, can have a "theory" of a "probabl[e]" story be correct.

(Dog bites man.)
Ad hominem. FLOSS is not a mad dog. And we didn't do anything to provoke Brown. More like man sees innocent friendly stray puppy that's playing with kids (while he charges for kids to play with his own puppy) and attacks the former, and puppy tries to defend itself.

Brown says their accounts are hopelessly shifting and contradictory -- not only against the historical record, but in recent weeks.
Uh...I thought he said experts "agree" earlier. How can the accounts then be contradictory?

(Man bites back.)
Is he admitting rabies or something? That's not exactly how I'd go about managing a rabid dog.

and prices being driven down are a bad thing?

[wyldeone]

Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well.
I personally fail to see how this could be a bad thing. He seems to ignore the fact that a software (or hardware) company that can't compete with a f/oss competetor doesn't deserve to exist.

While hybrid software appears to be the same as open source, it isn't. Hybrid source code can never be true intellectual property. The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as private property, which makes the hybrid source model significantly different from true open source.
Which, of course, is the whole point of open source. Does he think that open source developers slave away just so that some corporate entity can sell all of their hard work? Brown seems to have a lack of knowledge concering this subject which he claims to know so much about. It is a worrysome prospect, then, that his FUD could actually be believed by someone.

Re:and prices being driven down are a bad thing?

[colinrichardday]

He also fails to realize that hardware and software are complementary goods, so that if the price for software falls, then the demand for hardware increases.

Is anything more transparently Microsoft inspired?

[cardshark2001]

Quoth the (brown responds) article: "While hybrid software appears to be the same as open source, it isn't. Hybrid source code can never be true intellectual property. The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as private property, which makes the hybrid source model significantly different from true open source. Noone can ever truly accrue any value from owning hybrid source software"

Same old Microsoft bullcrap. What about Redhat? Eh... IBM seems to be doing okay with it too. They call this "researched", but what they really mean is "quoted out of context and distorted".

Okay. We can play that game too. I'm going to quote only from their article. Here goes: "Samizdat ... will be ... pro-Linux ... It is our hope that ... Linux ... is ... respected. ... in addition ... it is in ... [our] ... best interest ... that ... the US government ... produce ... leprosy ..."

Earlier in the article they said: "AdTI ... is ... Inherently Unstable".

There. Much better now that I've translated it for you.

Microsoft Won't be Happy

[urbaneassault]

"However, building a product that starts with the accomplishment of others and announcing it as completely your own work product, is not invention, nor is it innovation."
So, that would knock out most commercial software ventures since the 70's. I think Ken may lose some funding from microsoft by saying they aren't innovative because they stand on the accomplishments of others (DOS, Citrix) claiming them for themselves...

Forget International...

[Bishop923]

They aren't even respected in their own country

Talk about being about Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

His article is the exact tone of speech that Microsoft uses regarding open source, which then one has to ask is How much is Microsoft paying him. So in his oppinon its perfectly legal for Microsoft to have used BSD code in the networking stack, shouldn't the origins of that code be questioned, should microsoft open up the code, so we can audit it, i'm sure more open source code exists in their.
Further more if I write code, and wish to restrict it under GPL, isn't that my right? Remindings me of Bill Gates comments that 'open source' always exists, in other words it was fine while it was BSD, but GPL is too risky...

Oranges? Is there an Orange computer?

[mangu]

I've heard about "Apple" computers, but never "Orange" computers. Or are they painting computers in bright colors now?

Re:Oranges? Is there an Orange computer?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an orange Apple...

Re:Oranges? Is there an Orange computer?

[Tony-A]

Google Search Appliance (maybe closer to an orangish yellow)

Re:Oranges? Is there an Orange computer?

[shellbeach]

Our first family computer (and not replaced until 1991) was an Orange, one of many Apple ][ clones that were available in the early 80s. I still have fond memories of it ... my Father taught me to program on it and I wasted countless hours playing games such as Loderunner, Karateka and SkyFox - what more could you want as a kid?

Write a book

[sflory]

Hmm maybe
http://www.harpercollins.com/catalog/book_x ml.asp? isbn=0066620724
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/op ensources/book/to c.html
http://www.edu-books.com/Rebel_Code_Linux_ and_the_ Open_Source_Revolution_0738206709.html

Re:Write a book

[voudras]

http://www.the-future-of-ideas.com/

One tiny honest bit

[pjrc]

I jaw dropped when I caught this little gem of honesty among all the deception, spin, and half truths:

To write Samizdat, I worked with (and quoted) many individuals directly or indirectly familiar with Linux development. AdTI will continue to interview people within the open source profession about open source. It would be skewed and bias to only quote people that are anti-Linux or anti-open source. I have done this for years, and will continue to do so, regardless of what a source thinks of my theories.

At least we'll have a whole week of major open source / free software figures publishing rebuttals.

One thing is pretty clear. Tanenbaum has dealt a blow to their credibility, enough to attack him rather than be quiet and avoid drawing more attention to their critics. That's a good sign that exposing ADTI/Brown for the deceptive corp whoring spin doctors they are is hurting them.

With any luck, next week's rebuttals will circulate widely and further drive ADTI's reputation down. The more ADTI suffers from this, the better it will deter other "research groups" from taking Microsoft's money to publish lies and deceptive spin.

Sue oh please please sue!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't Linus sue? He could sue in the UK where the libel laws are very very very very strict, and the payouts are huge. Once he's won, the AdTI would be wiped out. Surely IBM could loan a couple of lawyers? Heck, why not start a fund. I'll be the first to contribute.

Burden of proof

[Man of E]

From the conclusion: Professor Tanenbaum did not convince AdTI that Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux kernel from scratch.

It doesn't matter if AdTI is convinced or not, because Tannenbaum doesn't really need to convince them of anything. They are the ones making accusations, and so the burden of proof is on THEM. Linus doesn't have to prove he wrote the kernel, AdTI has to prove that he didn't, and no sensible person would consider this drivel to be 'proof'. As it stands, it's pure slander.

Unfortunately, many people reading this report (lawmakers) aren't going to be sensible or well-informed enough to realize this. It's the same as with the SCO case, they can talk about infringing code all they want, but then it's THEIR job to prove it.

Penny Arcade parallels?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first paragraph of Ken Brown's response (About how he didn't intend this to be accepted by pro-linux people) strikes me as eerily reminiscent of this Penny Arcade strip. It's as if Brown is saying that his book is not "for" the sort of people who are able to refute his statements.

Convenience

[Anonymous Coward]

The SCO PR machine is starting to lose momentum, and Microsoft's pumped about as much money into that as they can.

So now the ADTi thing is starting up.

In six months once ADTi's shouted itself hoarse, it will be something else. And like SCO and ADTi, that something else will also have funding ties to Microsoft.

Wow.

[DaveJay]

After reading Ken Brown's response, I can only say this: I have never in my life read something written by someone so obviously and transparently dedicated to ruining someone's reputation on the basis of arbitrary speculation and doubt. This is major-league political-type mudslinging, and it's painfully obvious that the only reason he's doing it (barring some personal vendetta, which I doubt) is to cast doubt in the community on Linux vs. SCO .

If this man came up to me, handed me a hundred dollar bill, and used the same type of arguments he used in his "response" to convince me that the hundred dollar bill was freely and legally mine with no strings attached, I'd cram the bill back into his hands, run away, and call the police.

Re:Wow.

[peeping_Thomist]

This is major-league political-type mudslinging, and it's painfully obvious that the only reason he's doing it (barring some personal vendetta, which I doubt) is to cast doubt in the community on Linux vs. SCO .

This is GOOD news, because (1) it shows that free software is really in the big leagues now, and (2) the attack is so incompetently done.

adti running on FreeBSD

[thakadu]

I am sure it is well known by now that www.adti.net is running FreeBSD (at least according to Netcraft). Is this a ploy by the the real sponsors of the report?

Sharpest Knife?

[saddino]

He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer," but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people, and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world.

Mr. Brown is clearly the drawer itself, rigid and defiant in the face of well-informed and well-argued counterpoints to his (especially in the light of the sheer amount of critcism) pathetic straw grapsing.

His point -- ironic that he, the alleged "dull" knife should have one -- is almost hysterical in its adherence to semantics: he is "right" simply because a "blank screen" could not have been Linus' starting point. In the parlance of the vulgarian: no shit sherlock. Every programmer builds upon the collective works of the other (even his surely esteemed Mr. Gates wrote BASIC from existing specifications) and the line between "stealing" and "innovating" is thicker than he would care to admit.

Please. Let us leave Mr. Brown alone and collecticly close this drawer. His dellusional arrogance -- as if the U.S. Government would stop and listen to his shrill "arguments" -- betrays his objective: to attack what he does not understand, to malign what he can't comprehend and to dimiss what he cannot possibly accept: open source is here to stay, and all the covertly funded "studies" to work against the tides are surely for naught.

AdTI has now been exposed in the same light as this fishy "research" that recently surfaced; Ken Brown took the bait and shoved it down his very own throat. Now, Mr. Brown, please try to remain quiet while your book lingers on the shelves.

Noone? Good grief!

[AndroidCat]

I had to go and check the article to be sure. He actually uses "noone" quite a number of times. This person is suposed to be a writer and uses noone instead of no one, and then doesn't run it through a spelling checker before posting it? Wow...

This is seriously going to destroy MS user base

[kardar]

By making this a partisan issue,(i.e. republicans=proprietary; democrats=open source), such as this Mr. Brown is doing, the user base of Microsoft products is effectivly going to get split in half.

In the long run, these types of policial actions will cause Microsoft to lose a significant, perhaps even 50%, of its user base. This is very very bad news not for Linux, but for Microsoft.

One cannot help but get the feeling that these individuals are out to destroy Linux, but because they are not computer scientists, and don't understand very much about computers, and because the audience of this document are not computer scientists, but politicians who are not computer scientists, the effect that the authors appear to be looking for (i.e. destroying Linux) is actually going to destroy Microsoft.

This is very very very bad for Microsoft. Very very bad for Microsoft. Why is Ken Brown so adamant about destroying and dividing the Microsoft user base?

He goes to same church as Darl

[Anonymous Coward]

Mormon?

Brown's response mostly crap except. ....

[eddiegee]

the recommendation that government sponsored research be under BSD or MIT licenses. If my tax dollars go to fund compsci research, I want it to be available to anyone, commercial or private. The fact that a big corporation can make it proprietary and sell it does not change the fact that the original release is still available. It allows the innovations developed to spread across both commercial and FOSS projects. Windows TCP/IP sucked hard before they took a look at the BSD stack!

The rest of the article was bluster and hyperbole. But I'll let the rest of the Slashdot crowd comment on that part.

Muh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying that it's still the truth, it's just inaccurate and/or misleading? ...

Are you, perchance, a lawyer?

Re:Muh?

[justsomebody]

IANAL.

Truth is never present in single form. And sqeezing out *the* right words you can get completely different meaning. Of course no one will agree, but Ken Brown seems satisfied.

C'mon it's (:THE:) ^_- *TRUTH* ^_- by Kenneth Brown
p.s. Don't tell anybody hat he was payed by M$

Hope you don't think I was serious about Pretenderle too. It would be a trip from one world of fiction to another.

Some choice quotes...

[Cytlid]

Of course, I too can twist words and take them out of context:

"...a point recently raised by the president of Symantec Corporation. He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer..."

What would the President of Symantec think of Ken Brown's assessment of him?

"AdTI publishes its work for all audiences. It is written so that even if a group of elementary school children asked Tanenbaum the same questions AdTI did, they would see the very contradictions we reported."

Bravo, Ken... in Your World (c), Linus Torvalds couldn't possibly write a kernel in 6 months, yet elementary children discuss Intellectual Property law, Unix operating system history, and the differences between open source and commercial software development.

The Positive

[geomon]

"The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source."

I hope he convinces the Congress to fund this research.

Because they will have the BSD and/or MIT license, all GPL authors will have to do is incorporate the code and keep the attribution.

No problem, Ken. Keep us apprised of your progress in lobbying Congress.

As for asserting that the open source community, or Linus in general, is guilty of theft, you haven't made your case. In fact, your witnesses (at trial for slander, I assume) will testify in support of the plaintiff.

That will be funny.

How was the stealing supposed to have taken place?

[Lemuel]

Brown is intent on proving that Linus stole from Minix or UNIX. In what way was he supposed to have done this? Did he look at how they behaved and write something that does the same thing? Sure, and there is nothing wrong with that. Did he steal source code? If so it should be easy enough to compare Minix or the Lion document and see what was stolen. OK, maybe it is tedious to compare the source code. Brown should provide some concrete proof such as lines of stolen code rather than trying to attack Linus by saying he couldn't have written Linux.

"Hybrid Source"

[Crazy Eight]

"The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time."

If this "hybrid source" concept weren't a bald attempt at framing any discussion of Linux with the presumption that it is half founded on theft it would be ironic. Brown claims to advocate the BSD licence which can allow for software that exhibits the exact quality he deems a "sin".

No worry

[mcc]

3. Thousands and thousands and thousands of pissed-off Linux zealots buy said book, in order to debunk it, burn it, sit it on the shelf and laugh at it, whatever... 4. Profit!!!

An ingenious plan, but the flaw in it is that slashdot readers can't be bothered to click on the link at the top of the slashdot article so that they can know what they're talking about before they comment. You really think that they're going to actually get up out of the house to buy a book??

Re:No worry

[GooTi]

You really think that they're going to actually get up out of the house to buy a book??

Buzzword of the day: e-shop

Tar baby...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Ken Brown's article is really, really lame, filled with wrong arguments, misquotes and lies. He's really trying to burn the latest tiny pieces of respect someone could hold for him.

Maybe this is exactly what he doesn't care about?

If I love something, I think about it.

If I hate something, I think about it.

If I do not care, I don't think about it.

The more energy ATDI's backers get sucked into this, the better for them because the absurdity can't be discarded. It *sticks* and that seems to be the goal entirely...not having credibility or winning. Get a reaction, and that in itself is a "win" for them.

An anthropology rule: People don't pass laws or shun what doesn't happen. There would be no point.

By getting people to take this seriously, they've made something out of nothing...and folks have fallen for it!

RMS comments to Kenny's Lies

[mslinux]

Linux is a kernel, not an operating system. Kenny Brown does not know the difference.

GNU is not Unix, and GNL is not Linux. GNU/GNL proponents offer a set of high-quality, non-unix, non-linux, utilities that while being non-unix and non-linux are unix and linux like. All of these non-unix and non-linux utilities are free and can be used on GNU/unix and GNL/linux systems.

Please stop confusing the issues!!! And vote for me this November... DRM is bad. SCO is bad. HP is bad. IBM is the devil. Ken Brown is a blabbering idiot. Look to the turd... I mean hurd.

RMS

"If you can measure what you speak of and express it by a number, you know something about your subject; but if you cannot measure it, your knowledge is meager and unsatisfactory." -- Kelvin

Hybrid code at SCO

[Anonymous Coward]

Hybrid code?

SCO started out as a Linux company named Caldera. Then they bought a Unix company, and sold UNIX at the same time. If you want to find "Hybrid code", SCO is where it's at.

And btw, Did Bill Gates write Basic from scratch, starting off with a blank screeen?

What Brown seems to want

[One Louder]

So what's the actual goal of Brown's attack on Linux?

I thnk what he's trying to do here is cast enough doubt on the provenance of Linux, and by extension to other GPLed software, to elicit a change in public policy to prohibit the government from utilizing and developing software covered by the GPL.

This would, of course, seem to work in favor of proprietary software vendors.

However, if the justification is that the government should not be using software with any questionable lineage, then the policy be that *all* software used by the government should require a complete public intellectual property audit, including proprietary applications and operating systems.

So basically,

[Sevn]

Ken Brown is a dick.

An e-mail to Ken Brown....

[wintermute42]

OK, this was probably a waste of time. Ken Brown is so over the top that he has to have an agenda. But for what it is worth, here is a copy of an email I sent him (with minor changes)

Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 17:54:31 -0700
To: kenbrown@adti.net
Subject: Linux, Linus and so on...

Dear Mr. Brown:

I am a software engineer with over twenty three years of experience. Much of my background is in the design and implementation of system software, including compilers and runtime support. If you are interested you can find my resume at my domain.

I am not in the Linux fanatic camp. I use Linux, but in many ways I am disappointed with its popularity. I would much rather that the freeBSD operating system, which I regard as superior, had Linux's popularity. But popularity is the result of many factors, some of which have nothing to do with technology.

As a highly experienced software engineer and someone who is not a Linux fanatic, let me state that I absolutely believe that Linus Torvalds wrote Linux. And I also fully believe Prof. Tanenbaum when he states that Linux was not "stolen" from Minux.

Linux has been many years in development. The initial operating system was not the operating system that exists today. Linux has evolved over the years and many people have contributed to this evolution. As you note, Linus was young when he wrote Linux and I have no doubt that he too has evolved into a skilled and expert operating system designer and implementer. Linux is now far better for this experience and the work of its many contributors.

I find it rather odd that you, who are not an expert in software, are arguing against a large community of people who are experts, that Linus did not write Linux. I would hazard a guess that most UNIX systems programmers find your arguments silly. I also find it interesting that many of your arguments mirror those that have been put forward by Microsoft, a company that clearly finds Linux a threat.

Yours,

Wintermute

Re:An e-mail to Ken Brown....

[dollargonzo]

a well meant and kindhearted response, but frankly... you make the same mistakes that allow ken brown to say what he does.

The initial operating system was not the operating system that exists today.

linux is not an operating system. it is a kernel. i am sure you know this, but notice what he says about gcc. his confusion with the naming of linux as gnu/linux as about the operating system...and if what linus wrote was the OS as a whole, ken brown would actually have a point.

but, we seem to agree that he doesn't. if we as software engineers make such mistakes, how can we expect ken brown not to?

Re:An e-mail to Ken Brown....

[dollargonzo]

for once my sig is appropriate to your comment and the article :)

Intentionally ambiguous use of the word "derived"

[Theovon]

I think the esteemed writer does not understand the variations in meaning that "derived" can have.

There are many ways in which Linux 'derives' certain contepts from Unix and Minix. But those derivations are based on IDEAS, and you cannot copyright ideas.

There is nothing wrong or untoward about noticing that someone else had a good idea and imitating that.

Where copyright comes into the picture is when you actually copy something tangible. In this case, the tangible thing is source code. It's been verified by a number of parties that Linus did not copy any code from Unix or Minix. No laws or ethics were broken.

In much the same way that OpenOffice imitates Microsoft Office (and Corel Office, etc.), or how chemists can mix keytones and esters together and imitate fruit flavors artificially, Linux imitates Unix and Minix. An even better analogy would be how "The Matrix" borrows ideas heavily from "Ghost in the Shell". The similarities are undeniably, but no one stole anything, violated copyright, or did anything unethical.

Versus Proprietary?

[Bob9113]

Samizdat concludes that the root of attribution, IP misappropriation, and acknowledgement problems in Linux is ---in fact--- the trust model. Basically, Torvalds and other Linux advocates are admitting to using a 'three monkeys' policy for software development: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. Specifically, Torvalds and the Linux kernel management team accept blind source code contributions. Then, they ask for a certification. But the certification does not hold the contributor, the Linux community, or Torvalds legally accountable. Nor does it guarantee that the source is produced in a 'clean room'.

How does this differ from proprietary software development? Is he suggesting that proprietary software development organizations audit their code against the entire body of code created throughout history? There is nothing in the FLOSS model that increases the likelihood that proprietary code will be incorporated when compared to proprietary development.

Fine restaurants and hotels

[pklinken]

Kenneth Brown is president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution and director of its technology research programs. (...) He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer," but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people, and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world.

"Do we have a deal, Mr. Brown?" Agent Gates asked.
"You know, I know this steak doesn't even exist." Brown said, as he twirled the piece of steak on his fork, examining it closely, "I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious.
After nine years, you know what I realized? Ignorance is bliss." As he said this, he put the piece of steak in his mouth.

Retch!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone make it all the way through without puking?

Spell check...please

[Tarq666]

I know it's a petty case, but where I'm from 'noone' is actually hyphenated (no-one) or two words (no one). Even Word doesn't accept the spelling he used in his article and that many here have chosen to copy...

This quote says it all:

[Anonymous Coward]

"It would be skewed and bias to only quote people that are anti-Linux or anti-open source. I have done this for years, and will continue to do so, regardless of what a source thinks of my theories."

Miscrosoft deserves a refund.

[waferhead]

This "letter" reads like bad propaganda under even a quick scan.

I doubt even a idiot PHB couldn't see this is obviously BS.

I suspect everyone and their dog will dissect it and smash the arguments to bits, but even trying to be "open minded", it... as they say... Fails it.

Hum, under construction...

[1001011010110101]

Did you notice that both Tanenbaun and Linus comments are still "under construction"? They have been that way for ages. They sure had time to post a reply.
I wonder why they didn't do the same they did with the press...just link them. Well, really, I don't wonder that much :)

Ken Brown can't write

[SlideGuitar]

What is really impressive about this piece of drivel is that a big fancy think tank would put out an article that is filled with grammar and usage errors.

You would think that MS money could at least buy an extremely well written and smooth argument. There is of course an intelligent argument to make against Linux by twisting the intereview comments that Brown received, but you would have to do it more carefully than Brown does it. I could take the people he quotes and do a better job than this.

I don't get it. Maybe the point is to enrage people.... with poor use of English.

"AdTI is certain that inevitably, some unfortunate user of Linux will be facing an incalculable legal problem." Incalculable legal problem? Are some legal problems calculable?

"Meanwhile, we should also very plainly ask, ?who[m] are we trusting??" Well, Mr. Brown, is it who or whom? Do you know? (The m is used when it's an object, which it is not here.... eg. "in whom do we put trust" OR "Who do we put trust in? What the F is your coy little [m] supposed to mean?

"Tanenbaum told us about the Coherent project repeatedly, but it was easy to research that it was a completely different situation." NOT English

"We included this interview to provide another perspective for readers to understand the magnitude of the Torvalds story." NOT exactly English.

"We also included this interview to resonate the character of Mr. Torvalds." To "resonate"? I'm sure he means SOMETHING nasty, but what?

" In a published interview between Eric Raymond and Linus Torvalds, Raymond brandishes how Torvalds basically derived Linux from Minix." Brandishes? OK, we know what you mean, but ... come on.

"There is far too much boasting about stealing, reverse engineering, and illegal copying espoused by some within the open source community." (Boasting is "espoused"? Could we possibly butcher the English language any more? Ideas are espoused, boasting is done, I've never heard anyone espouse boasting.)

And on and on and on... this is one low budget dude MS is paying. Not to mention that he appears to be a vicious liar.

Re:Ken Brown can't write

[HugePenguin]

Love is in the air! One of the best posts yet! Thank You!

Linux a disease?

[Anonymous Coward]

If Linux is a disease, and Microsoft Windows is a virus, then what is Mac OSX?

Re:Linux a disease?

[Anonymous Coward]

A corpse?

Who do you "trust" more?

[BumpyCarrot]

Within two days of AdTI's release of Samizdat, OSDL(1) member Linus Torvalds affirmed AdTI's concerns, announcing that Linux kernel contributions depend largely on 'trust'. In an attempt to fix the system, Linus Torvalds announced an ambiguous policy(2) to promote better 'trust'.

Who do you trust more? A software developer that lays its source code out for all to see, or a software developer who keeps it closely under wraps?

The AdTI is claiming to analyse the validity of this "trust" right now, and is failing miserably. Isn't that proof enough that the system works?

He's a tool, but even blunt objects can kill

[Liquidrage]

My take, after having actually read Mr. Brown's reply is that he is clearly out to prove that Linux was built on code that was copywritten.
OK, enough stating the obvious. Onto some thoughts.

Did Linus use/duplicate some code from Minix or Unix source? I think that's obvious. And really, although I doubt a court would buy it, I think his claim that Linus probably did have Unix source has some merit. Though that's just me guessing.

The question I have then is.
If it could be proven, does it create a really big problem for Linux?

If it is a problem, then what? Linux isn't Atari. It can't pay someone off with a huge sum of money.

I'm not worried about it much, but the picture he painted in the article does give me more concern then SCO ever did to be honest.

Microsoft is the source of "hybrid" software

[0x0d0a]

"Hybrid source code" is a phrase coined by former Tocqueville Chairman Gregory Fossedal. The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time.

Okay. I cannot imagine what he's talking about here, though. The GPL explicitly forbids such a license being used with any GPLed code, so unless he's just trying to mislead people or doesn't understand the legal nature of the GPL, he's not talking about the GPL.

The only people I can think of that mix "closed" and "open" code would be closed companies. Microsoft, for instance, used the BSD TCP stack.

I get the impression that Mr. Brown is trying to make people make the association between this "hybrid" business and the GPL, which is nonsensical -- of all the people involved, GPL users are the *least* likely to fit under his definition of "hybrid".

While hybrid software appears to be the same as open source, it isn't.

I can't agree -- I don't think that anyone would think that Microsoft's software is open.

Hybrid source code can never be true intellectual property.

Not true. Microsoft's software is presumably their own intellectual property.

The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as private property, which makes the hybrid source model significantly different from true open source.

Microsoft has made billions with their IP. I doubt that Ken Brown is correct.

Noone can ever truly accrue any value from owning hybrid source software, because everybody (and anybody) has the rights to every line of improvement in it.

I don't have rights to Microsoft's software.

It sounds like he's talking about the GPL -- but the GPL does not allow mingling of closed and open source. The BSD license at least allows code licensed under it to be placed under such a "hybrid" license -- as Microsoft did. The GPL does not.

Worse, many argue that if hybrid source is used the wrong way, it can make other source code hybrid source as well.

Notice that he said "many argue". This is clearly legally wrong -- there is no legal basis for "accidentally" licensing something under the GPL. If you steal GPL code and put it into your closed-source product, you may be guilty of copyright infringement, but the remainder of your code will not be automatically licensed under the GPL.

The only relevance that GPL-licensing one's code would have is that it would be a guaranteed way to avoid the copyright infringement. This is *more* permissive than the case if a closed company stole source from another closed company -- it would have no such guaranteed out. I guarantee that any company that finds out that Microsoft stole its code and put it into Office is going to have a *field* day suing Microsoft.

I can only guess that he's trying to spread fear about getting anywhere near the GPL.

The hybrid source model negatively impacts the intellectual property model for all software, and inevitably the entire IT economy.

Again, the "hybrid source" argument is just plain silly.

As long as the value of the IT economy is dependent on the preservation of intellectual property, it is counterproductive for the U.S. government to invest in Linux.

Okay, *now* we have a more interesting argument. This may or may not be true. It is true that Microsoft maintaining a monopoly has the potential to bring a huge amount of wealth into the United States. However, even for us USians, there are significant efficiency advantages to allowing anyone, anywhere to be able to freely use and modify their computer's software.

I do not have evidence to rebut this point. On the other hand, I claim that Ken Brown has no evidence to support this point either.

My suspicion would be that "chaper, more open, more widely available" actually globally increases the quality of life of people to such an extent that the loss of local

Re:Microsoft is the source of "hybrid" software

[Brandybuck]

Okay. I cannot imagine what he's talking about here, though. The GPL explicitly forbids such a license being used with any GPLed code, so unless he's just trying to mislead people or doesn't understand the legal nature of the GPL, he's not talking about the GPL.

I really, really, really do not want to defend Ken Brown. I think he is an idiot. But I do understand what he is saying.

The first problem is that he is using the word "free" as a synonym for unowned, unencumbered, not-copyrighted, public domain software. He is in essence using the word "free" in exactly the sense the the FSF wants him to. But the GPL is not fully free in this manner. It includes encumbrances and restrictions. Purposefully. The second problem is that he is using the word "proprietary" in its strict definition, as the state of being owned and controlled by private interests. He is correct in this usage.

So Ken Brown is correct, in that the GPL is a hybrid license containing elements of both free and proprietary.

His error is using the term "hybrid" when he really meant "copyleft".

Re:Microsoft is the source of "hybrid" software

[Anonymous Coward]

Could he be referring to MySQL and their dual licensing approach, when he refers to hybrid licenses? Which personally I don't see anything wrong with either, fits our needs of open source, and there business agenda.

Re:Microsoft is the source of "hybrid" software

[maximilln]

So Ken Brown is correct, in that the GPL is a hybrid license containing elements of both free and proprietary

I feel that it's a question of freedom. There are two definitions of freedom: freedom which is free to do anything and freedom which guarantees further freedom. I believe that freedom is naturally at odds with greed. Freedom can be limited to protect itself (GNU GPL) but freedom cannot be given away (BSD, employee agreements, power of attorney).

As a metaphorical example, how do we feel about American (freedom, liberty, rah rah rah and all that) made firearms being used to enslave or wrongfully imprison people in other nations? Not that there's any good way to tell a firearm purchaser,"Look, you can only use this for _GOOD_" but, back to the software world, the GNU GPL does indeed have this luxury on source code.

From the GNU GPL
To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights.

Someone needs to reacquaint our politicians and employers with the concept of "forbid anyone to...ask you to surrender the rights." Define a natural right as anything which is physically possible. If you can do it then you have a right to do it. Theft is a natural right. Distance a natural right from a moral right. A moral right is something that you should do. Theft is not a moral right (ignore the Robin Hood red herring for a moment). Is the GNU GPL being hypocritical in asking the licensee to surrender their natural right to take a GPL work, compile it, and distribute it as a proprietary software package and legally restrict anyone from reverse-engineering or decompiling it to check the nature of the source? The moral right is never an issue since it's illegal to decompile most proprietary code. I would say "no", because GNU freedom which restricts greed is guaranteeing more GNU freedom.

No g-news is good g-news without Gary GNU.

Who is this guy?!

[FozzMan]

What a crappy writer. His language is ambiguous and confusing. I feel like he's trying to hammer a really big square peg through a very tiny round hole.

I just spent a couple months researching and writing a paper on why Open Source software should be adopted by public(government/schools/libraries) and non-profit organizations. I spent about half my time making the paper understandable for the average reader(a college undergrad). The end result was a paper that everyone could read without being drowned by tech talk, and overly-complicated phrases. It's a little too dumb for techies, but that wasn't who I was writing for.

Kevin brown on the other hand, obviously never took freshmen english. His writing is crap, and the only reason I forced myself to read the whole thing was because I wanted to rip every aspect of his argument to shreds. This is pretty sad, since I probably know as much, if not more than his desired audience, and should have no problem reading about the topics(IP and software development).

I think the only way we can fend off FUD like this, is to make things easy and understandable for the masses. After all, politicians aren't much smarter. Luckily Kevin Brown and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution already sucks at clarity, so we don't have too much work to do.

At first I felt his point, about hybrid software might be valid. Then I thought some more. He says that Linus, Tanenbaum, and everyone else is wrong when they say Linus wrote Linux from scratch. However his proof of this is, "I don't buy it." Unfortunately this "proof" is total crap, and Brown does not provide any other examples. All he says is that "i'm afraid of this threat" which he never really clearly shows is actually a threat(ie: Linux infringes on IP), just that it might be a threat. Sounds kind of like the US case for war in Iraq, except this argument doesn't even provide direct (but incorrect evidence); just hunches from scooby doo and the gang.

Once again, his essay is total crap.

- fozz

In related news....

[Geno Z Heinlein]

... the hybrid source model depends heavily upon sponging talent from U.S. corporations and/or U.S. proprietary software.... and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector.

In related news, the Neanderthal Marketing Association issued a statement claiming that larger Cro-Magnon brains are unfairly depreciating the value of hunting grounds with less food by allowing more evolved humans to migrate. NMA spokesman Oogla said, "We want study cost 5 billion shells-with-holes-drilled-in-them. We want make Cro-Magnon brain small again."

Re:What a hatchet job

[jtev]

Dude, that's a great line. A realy great line. Can I use it?

You are a liar.

[fatboy]

There is far too much boasting about stealing, reverse engineering, and illegal copying espoused by some within the open source community.

Point me to one person that has any signifigant contributions to an Open Software project that has boasted about stealing code or illegal copying. I bet you can't, because you simply made that up.

Re:So, Here's The Problem With Ignoring This Guy..

[VGR]

Realize that we haven't seen *ANYTHING* yet. Just imagine the death throes of one of the most profitable companies that ever existed. EXPECT character assassination. EXPECT lobbying. EXPECT fronts like SCO. EXPECT software patenting and litigation. EXPECT FUD books, FUD articles, and FUD conferences.

It's a little scarier than that. Considering the amount of money at stake, is it really such a stretch to believe they would resort to more brutal methods? Physical violence is an unlikely last resort (but not an impossibility). Far more likely are aggressive seizure campaigns, à la Scientology raids on homes, under the guise of believing pirated software is on the premises. Anyone familiar with such bully tactics knows they are impossible to fight, particularly at the moment they take place. (If you're thinking that a warrant is needed, think again; Scientology didn't need one, and the RIAA hasn't needed one.)

How likely are you to risk becoming a prominent Microsoft-basher if you know that you could lose all of your hardware and software? Or that someone might invade your home while you're away, breaking locks and possibly harming whatever pets are deemed a threat or nuisance?

Yeah, I know, tinfoil paranoia. But also things that have really happened to real people. Considering how far above the law Microsoft has shown itself to be, so far, I don't see this as a large leap.

And no, I have never seen the movie Antitrust.

hua?? "users have to" what...?

[IBitOBear]

Your oddest bit: Users have to be able to turn to someone/somewhere for support, for resources, for guidance; because there is no single authority over Linux, many companies and users are uncomfortable with it.

Having a "single authority" over Linux is no useful goal. The entire point of the history and value of open source is that there is no such point. A single authority is granted draconian control. When Microsoft decides, as the signle authority over Windows, that Win2K is no longer to be sold, distributed, or supported, where will the comfort go? How happy will your business be?

Where can I go for support? Resources? Guidance? Well, if not to myself, then to *ANY* *KNOWLEDGEABLE* *PERSON* *ANYWHERE* willing to act as guide, resource or structural span 8-).

To date, companies have become used to the idea that software is a secret art paracticed by some new preisthood. This is expected. It is, indeed, the foundation of every technophobic movie from the fifties and sixties. (Can you say "Colossis: The Forbin Project"?)

The surreal position that we somehow magically benefit from having an almighty dictate how our things should be is, perhaps, useful as an article of faith in a religion, but it is anathma to every other human persuit.

Would you, even for a moment, consider accepting a position in life where you just had this one credit card controlled by some finincial manager you never met? Every so often, when your maganger decided you needed more money, he would recharge your card. You can't check your balance. You cannot find out when or if you will receive a deposit. You cannot find out how much your employer is "paying you" and how much of that actually makes it onto your card. You cannot take out cash and you can only lease or rent but never buy. At any time, you may be temporarily or perminantly out of money. And if the card gets declined, you can't find out whether it will be declined for a day or for the rest of your life. Would you accept this?

And would you be happy when you suddenly discovered that you have nothing to eat?

These are *exactly* the rules you agree to every time you click that EULA. Sure, it's your Novel, or Dissertation, Family Photo Album, or whatever. But it is M$ Office or whatever that says that you can print or use or look at it. But that's fine. If they decide to take their ball and go home you could... sue... if you could only open Outlook and find your lawyer's phone number...

The simple fact is that a large number of sheep^Wpeople feel more comfortable if they can just ignore things and do what everybody else is doing. Especially if everybody else is also agressively failing to "look behind the curtian." It is, however, dumb.

And DUMB is VERY BAD for BUSINESS.

So I wouldn't put too much stock or desire into giving someone single authority over your computers and such. Someone will take you up on the offer, and it won't be out of altruisim.

This is the Big Lie.

[waferhead]

80+ percent of all programmers work exclusively on software for "In House" uses... NOT retail sales.

Linux/Open source software (can) make them MANY TIMES more productive.

The GPL ALLOWS this use... The code "borrowing" is EXPLICITLY allowed, as long as they do not distribute binaries.

I expect the next installment of this shill will move from calling Linux a "leprosy" to simply using the troll term "open sores".

I almost expected it in the article... Looked like a professionally written troll.

Cn I call him a Nazi so this can end?

Re:This is the Big Lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a fairly large company that freely uses open source stuff, modifies it, makes money from it and we do it all legally.
We provide a service, we do not distribute software.
Like it or not, that's the way everything's going and GPL works for this business model. We provide a service based on modified open source software (which does not make us disclose our proprietary pieces) and provide tech support, which provides a lot of jobs.
We also contribute to various projects and pay people for it, sometimes not even related to what we need. It's a lot easier for us if our bug fix is in the next downloaded release...
From a purely capitalist perspective, it can work, mainstream software is becoming free, custom and hardware is a tangible product that costs money.

Re:This is the Big Lie.

[Per Abrahamsen]

> Linux/Open source software (can) make them MANY TIMES more productive.

There are actually political movements against making people more productive. From a narrow, short sighted point of view, making people more productive leads to unemployment, as less people can do the same amount of work. Whenever new technology or new business methods improve productivity, the Luddites will try to stop it.

Of course, from a broad, long sighted point of view, improved productivity makes the society richer, as the amount of people can produce more. This is why we are not spending our entire (short) life hunting and gathering foot.

Re:This is the Big Lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

I expect the next installment of this shill will move from calling Linux a "leprosy" to simply using the troll term "open sores".

open sores, so funny, but who is going to clean up all the coffee, I shot out of my nose, off my monitor and keyboard.

Re:This is the Big Lie.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an open source proponent and I have used the term open sores on a number of occasions. Truth be told, most of those occasions were in reference to the former caldera back when they were complaining that the GPL is keeping them from making money.

BSD licensing contradiction

[timotten]

...The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source. Government investment in open source development will accelerate innovation. However, increased investment should be in true open source, open source without any stipulations, other than attribution and copyright notification, not hybrid source... ...The purpose of Samizdat is to demonstrate how and why the hybrid model encourages these types of activities [stealing, reverse engineering, and illegal copying].

AdTI argues the best way to solve this problem is to create a more substantive pool of true, free open source code...

Mr. Brown argues that the "hybrid" (e.g. copyleft) model encourages "stealing, reverse engineering, and illegal copying." His evidence is that some supporters of copyleft licensing make contradictory claims about who said or did what and when they said or did it. I agree that such contradictions are unfortunate, sometimes relevent for practical reasons, and often difficult to resolve.

Mr. Brown has successfully demonstrated that some large, open, multinational, cooperative projects (organized by free agents) do not provide the same type of legalistic consistency as a bureaucratic, corporate or governmental project. Kudos to Mr. Brown.

I agree that some hybrid licenses encourage large, open, cooperative projects, and such projects may suffer some legal laxness. But it does not follow -- and I don't agree -- that "true" properietary and "true" open-source licenses discourage such laxness. Indeed, the case-law in computer-related IP was built on the indiscretions and disagreements of companies which use proprietary licensing. At the same, "true" open source projects -- like contemporary BSD or XFree86 -- suffer the same level of laxness as Linux.

Oh, whatever. I'm getting tired of writing.

Ken has been one busy boy today

[NoWhereMan]

Does he not realize that Linux runs on embedded systems.

That seems to be only the tip of the iceberg of where his reasoning falls short. I got a personal reply from him today when I sent a message expressing my concerns. He seems to be one genuinely deluded individual. He acknowledged that Dennis Ritchie response on Groklaw and does not see anything 'incorrect, wrong or invalid' about the way he is presenting the material.

Besides all the email he responded to today, he had time to put forth the garbage being exposed here. He tries to take the high moral ground and talk about 'trust' but it looks more like a hatchet job.

To write Samizdat, I worked with (and quoted) many individuals directly or indirectly familiar with Linux development. AdTI will continue to interview people within the open source profession about open source. It would be skewed and bias to only quote people that are anti-Linux or anti-open source. I have done this for years, and will continue to do so, regardless of what a source thinks of my theories.

It seems like he enjoys playing word games as evidenced by his need to talk about "Hybrid source code" which is a term they invented. His described purpose for writing this book is to suggest a better way for the legal community, the science community, the business community, and government to get along.

If he is sincere in wanting to get along better maybe Slashdot could send him the 10 highest moderated questions.

Re:Ken has been one busy boy today

[Roblimo]

"If he is sincere in wanting to get along better maybe Slashdot could send him the 10 highest moderated questions."

Good idea. I'll ask him.

- Robin

Value of Software

[nuggz]

There are two values and some choose to neglect one or the other.

1. Those who sell it see the value they get, the price for the product and related services.

2. Those who use it see the usage value of the product.

Some are scared that open source will lower value #1, what the others MUST realize is that this doesn't change #2 at all.

Brown's fatal assumption

[jht]

He treats Linux as if it emerged, fully formed back in 1991. It wasn't. What Linux was back then was a crude monolithic kernel that was "inspired" by Minix (though implemented in a much less elegant fashion), was based on public information about Unix interfaces and structures, and was nothing more than the germ of an OS.

The reason Linux overcame that to become a viable OS is simple - unlike all the other Unixes that existed at the time, it was Free (GPL) software, Linus actively solicited input and help, and the underlying GNU system was reaching a corresponding level of maturity sufficient to let Linux be the kernel to complete it.

Essentially, that first draft of Linux was crud, but thanks to some foresight on Linus' part and a lot of good timing coincidences it became the mighty penguin we see today. Had the Hurd been ready back then, this might have happened differently. If Tanenbaum had changed his Minix license to encourage development with it, Minix might be the OS we all use today.

But Linus was in the right place at the right time with enough of a kernel to capture developer interest. And the rest is history, however much Mr. Brown would like to change it to suit his political goals.

Arguing Is Pointless

[Bob9113]

I've just finished reading the piece and can only conclude one thing:

Arguing with this guy is completely pointless. He is constantly mixing the legal protections afforded by copyright, trademark, trade dress, and patent. He bounces off every logical fallacy in the book. It's like the open letter wars with SCO, but with a guy who is clearly far more versed in rhetoric.

There is only one clear response to this in my opinion; force him to address the real issue. Point blank: What code are you alleging has been infringed, and by what code in the Linux kernel? The entire history of the Linux kernel is available for public review - if he is going to make slanderous accusations about Linus, he had better be ready to back them up in court.

Pot? Meet kettle.

[Dunkirk]

"However, building a product that starts with the accomplishment of others and announcing it as completely your own work product, is not invention, nor is it innovation. Innovation can only work properly if innovators properly credit the work of others, especially if the innovator has decided to introduce the product into the marketplace for commercial gain."

Why not go after, say, Microsoft, then, if this is the real problem? That's been their operational model since they started their business, and they're a much bigger problem, and, therefore, target.

An admirer

[Anonymous Coward]

While reading mr Brown's response, an old and familiar feeling crept up my spine.

I have a strange passion. Although educated in the workings of logic and proof, I like to watch those documentaries on Atlantis, on 10.000 year old advanced civilizations (preferably Antarctic), depictions of astronauts in forgotten jungle temples, secret chambers under the sphinx containing hidden lore from the gods.

I crave to hear the outcasts of science explaining it all to me.

But not because I believe in such matters, Oh no, I merely admire their thinking. Somehow I like being immersed in their world of perverted logic. Perhaps it's the intellectual equivalent of a visit to the hall of mirrors, where things are distorted in unusual and amusing ways too?

Verily, I get a strange twisted pleasure from undergoing these warped argumentations.

Am I a sick person?

I immediately sensed the similarities between mr Brown's writings and the products of these unconventional historians. Ah, his words, so silkily seductive, oozing innuendo. His suggestive questions, lavishly wrapped in fallacies shrouded by half-truths! His proud dismissal of both reason and common sense!

It all feeled so deliciously... evil? Sinister laughter wells up my throat. A dark glee burns in my heart. Giddily, feverishly I desire to read more of mr Brown's book. Wonderful, naughty mr. Brown. I admire him. I love him. I want to have his baby. Am I an evil person?

Who did Brown steal from...

[Lulu of the Lotus-Ea]

Isn't it suspicious that Brown used someone else's intellectual property to create his _Samizdat_ book with? He typed the entire thing using Microsoft Word, and running on Microsoft Windows.

Why, the whole book isn't Brown's creation at all, but is just an expression of the ideas of Microsoft... ...oh, wait...

Re: who is paying him to write this crap?

[killjoe]

Obviously they have received money from MS. What's more interesting to me is that a huge percentage of their income seems to come from republican organizations.

We know what agenda MS is pushing but what does the republican party have against open source?

I think there was...

[The Conductor]

Orange Micro was in the business of making add-on cards for the Apple ][. I can't remember if they ever got mixed up with the motley fruit-monikered Taiwanese Apple ][ clones. (The Banana, the Pineapple, etc., many of which got blocked by customs when no one could show that the ROM's were "clean-room" developed. I guess the Laser II was clean, though.) I do seem to remember them hawking PC clones in the then-phonebook-sized Computer Shopper in the late 80's when everyone & his brother got in the clone business.

Nowadays they have a line of whacky peripherals, often prominently billing Mac support.

New Microsoft Strategy, no GPL for government

[RichMan]

Looking at this article and the recent Peru attack it is clear Microsoft is very afraid of governments going GPL. So afraid that Microsoft is even willing to throw the bone that BSD style open licenses.

I believe the clearest benefit that Linux has shown the modern world is benefit of a communal IP licenses. Take it, use it, but any improvements must be returned to the community. This is wonderful use of the creative commons and adds values for everyone. Well everyone but those who would leverage knowledge for private gain at the expense of public good.

Linux has paved the path to a new form IP. Microsoft is afraid that governments will see the benefits of this. This is very good for the general public, but bad for IP robber barons.

The Al Gore slander

[tgibbs]

The clearest indicator of Brown's dishonesty is his repeated use of the "Al Gore slander"--a technique of character assassination successfully employed by right wing extremists to undermine Al Gore's candidacy for president. It is a classic straw man scam: falsely accuse somebody of claiming to have "invented" something. Then point out that he did not literally invent it, thereby suggesting that he is a liar. Notably, although Brown explicitly accuses Torvald of claiming to have "invented" Unix (as opposed to having "developed" or "written" it), he provides no quotes to this effect.

Re:The Al Gore slander

[scottgfx]

The "Internet" comment was only ONE of the dumb things that Al Gore said during the 2000 campaign. Now if only he would do the honorable thing and step down from the Apple Computer Board of Directors.

Re:The Al Gore slander

[tgibbs]

The "Internet" comment was only ONE of the dumb things that Al Gore said during the 2000 campaign.

Except, of course, that he never said it. Like most of the "dumb" things that he supposedly said, it turned out to be disinformation concocted by the right wing Dirty Tricks team.

Re:The Al Gore slander

[scottgfx]

I'll have to see if I can get the "Right Wing Dirty Tricks Team" patch for my jacket. Sounds cool.

Would the actual Linux inventor please stand up?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the so called free-enterprise system of the US, what makes more sense:

To hitch onto the train of innovation and development, the best of breed code that is assembled into a working model of an operating system. Or, accept an expensive and less than adequately supported (in terms of bug fixes and feature adaption) system from Microsoft.

(This Ken Brown guy would have the clowns in Washington think the latter.)

Mr. Brown: The guys who invented the system prior Linus's Linux development are trying to tell you something profound: Linux is good.

So pick the metaphor that you like the best - standing on the shoulders of giants, or better: the philosophy of Unix itself:

Build on the Work of Others

and re-evaluate your conclusion. Let me help you:

While the development of Linux is certainly chaotic, what appears in the latest kernel is definitely a stronger and more trusted codebase than what we are asked to accept from Microsoft because what it protects is the trust among developers to keep trying to write better code.

Further, it doesn't pass the laugh test to suggest that Linus actually wrote the kernel himself. As many have pointed out he didn't develop Linux from the epoch himself. Where do you think your critics get their experience? Hypothetical Linux code-base-experts pretending to be co-developers of the code that has no original source?

Unlike Windows, the lab book of Linux is open for the public to see, modify and use to their own designs. In the official sense of business what is better than that? Ask Netscape how they'd feel about having a chance to modify the source of Windows to help make Their user's experience a better one.

I can't wait for the next book you write.

Exactly

[yoshi_mon]

Yet Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes -- certainly not a line of source code to borrow from, or to be tempted to borrow from.

By Brown's reasoning Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz didn't really invent calculus since they were using matmatical tools that were around since the dawn of man.

Re:Exactly

[Brandybuck]

Now that I think about it, I didn't bake those cookies from scratch last weekend, like I told all my friends. After all, I used a cookie sheet, cookie cutter, bowl, spoon and mixer. Neither did I mill my own flour or churn my own butter.

Shame on me for telling my friends "I baked some cookies!"

HTML formatting pwns me...

[wtom]

It's probably bad form to reply to one's own post, so excuse me in advance. Seeing as how I seldom post at all, I foolishly trusted the preview button, and did not put the appropriate html tags in.

It looked good in the preview at least.

I apologize for the poorly formatted underpants gnome profit list. If I could edit it, I'd fix it. Please pretend it is properly formatted, instead.

Not so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

AdTI is not so bad in comparison with this bunch of pathetic liars.

This whole mess is a non-issue

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have continued to be a non-issue, if the story hasn't been picked up by everyone and their cat.

Most of us know the history of Unix, most of us have used more than one OS at some point, most of us have looked at the source, and some are quite involved in the process.

Why keep feeding the wheels of Mr. Brown (an apt colour btw)? Let us just put this publication and the whole mess where it belongs -- into the thrashcan.

Cheers,

Ah yes political washings or moral trolls

[clusterix]

What we naive little geeks are seeing here is the political washing of a moral discussion. This occurs whenever there is a moral debate and money/fame/power to be had from picking a side. These are the guys that fill the extra seats in political 'news' shows.

Sadly, this is the same weak politicizing shit any wrong and evil big company tries -
cigarettes are cool and they haven't harmed this guy in this example story and all these health studies saying otherwise are flawed compared to the three we paid for saying they make you have nice breath. Trust us, we are your friends doing you a favor not just suits making money off of your addiction.

This guy is an obvious and not too convincing shill. He will continue to do this work - spew lies while talking to himself in the hope someone overhears as long as the money comes in.

This 'work' comes from the fact that they want to dirty the issue as it is freakin' obvious to anyone in the debate - proprietary software is OK but an open source version can't be worse and it should possibly be better.

Once the debate is properly against them (ie. the common man knows the truth). We will see threats come from them when/if political action against them is taken.
It costs too much to force this industry to do 'something good', we will have to do 'something bad for citizens' if this happens.

This is how any corporation fights in politics and now that foss is in the spotlight we got to just laugh some things off. I know, it is hard when we all want to be nice and helpful in providing people with honest answers and guys like this exist. Yes, these people make a living doing that, and no there probably won't be any 'karma' coming back on them. We want to believe in the goodness of others, that is one reason these guys make money.

Truthfully, we have beaten this guy and his lies up enough that any sane discussion has stopped. He will continue to troll to try and be relevant and piss off people. So it is better to ignore him and just reply only if anyone else brings him up. 'We' don't need to be in his debate and fuel him with more quotes to desperately take out of context.

In spite of himself, Brown is right

[Weasel Boy]

Ken Brown may utterly fail to make his point that Linus didn't write the first Linux kernel himself, but he is correct about one thing.

The US government should not fund the development of any GPL software. The government is an instrument of the people, and software it creates should be in the public domain, usable by anybody for any purpose.

Tell your Microsoft friends

[roca]

Ask your Microsoft techie friends whether they believe this rubbish.

Then ask them how they'd feel if someone wrote a book claiming that the hard work they did was actually stolen.

Then ask them how they feel about working for the company that funds this.

More evidence for moron-ness

[Goonie]

One of the questions from Ken Brown's lackeys was:

4) Could I get a copy of the original version of Unix that was released? My team is comparing Linux 1.0, Minix 1.0 and your first versions. If you can help with this, let me know.

As a cursory read of, say, this would have discovered, the original version of Unix was in PDP-7 assembler. While the overall design might be somewhat similar, there is no way in the world that "Linux 1.0" written in (mostly) ANSI C, and a little x86 assembler, would have detail similarities at the line-by-line level.

Not to mention the fact that Linux 1.0 was very far from Torvalds' earliest versions :)

Recruit CEO's of corps benefitting from OSS

[Arzach]

"So who is going to step forward and write a book, of researched FACTS to counteract this work of FICTION?"

This is an excellent idea, but you need an author who's not only a respected (IT) industry figure, someone who's reasonably famous (or at least known) outside of the IT industry and someone who doesn't have a problem thinking outside the box (who's also not threatened by Linux).

So, I'm thinkin' someone like Steve Jobs. Anyone else?

Re:Recruit CEO's of corps benefitting from OSS

[shatfield]

What about Neal Stephenson? He's technically literate, and a very well respected author of some good selling books. I bet he could do an excellent job on something like this.

Re:Recruit CEO's of corps benefitting from OSS

[bpechter]

How about Steve Wozniak, he's got no axe to grind and is very non-political and isn't involved in it as a major OS/Software/Hardware vendor.

ken brown: B.A. in English Literature

[flacco]

interesting how a guy with a B.A. in English becomes the President of the grand and glorious Alexis de Tocqueville Institute. makes sense i guess - his job is, afte all, to write fiction.

Burn, Kenneth, burn!

[Mr2cents]

May he burn in hell. Being an atheist, I consider that a strong statement. Mixing half-thruths and plain lies into a toxic mix just to get the result their investors want them to get, is below any moral level.

Minix is an educational OS! This is not about IP, it's about knowledge and learning. Do they also think I have to pay to my school when I write a book, because they learned me how to write??

Coining a new term: "kenbrown"

[mjrauhal]

How's about we coin a new term: "kenbrown". Usage:

kenbrown, n.: a person with no real idea of what he or she is talking about. Kenbrowns usually have ulterior motives and are fond of using quotes out of context. Eg. "The kenbrown just kept droning on and on, I couldn't talk any sense into him."

kenbrown, adj.: lacking scruples, misinformative, dishonest to the point of absurdity. Eg. "The marketing speech was totally kenbrown."

Mr. Ken Brown -- Linux ally

[0x0d0a]

I've been very pleased that Microsoft has found such incompetent PR people (Mr. McBride and Mr. Brown) to push Linux as bad for business. I mean, I worried for a while that Linux advocates might be using flawed, emotional arguments, and that their competitors might be presenting moe reasonable arguments -- however, the two have really made the anti-Linux front come off as rather stupid and dishonest.

I mean, seriously, *surely* Microsoft could find someone like the EFF's Eben Moglen, a lawyer who actually understands technology and doesn't have a habit of promulgating bullshit, to try to tear at the GPL's weak points. Instead, whoever is responsible for propaganda and PR at Microsoft has chosen the biggest bunch of chowderheads I've ever seen.

Seriously, if Microsoft had *immediately* gotten a couple of major tech companies to make frequent anti-Linux statements (SGI and Sun would have been great choices) and bought off some comptent people (who might have come off as being paid off by Microsoft, but could *still* have had vaguely reasonable arguments against Linux), they might have had a decent set of anti-Linux PR. Instead, they've consistently done an *awful* job.

Microsoft seriously blew the PR aspect of fighting Open Source. I'm very curious to see what their next move is.

If they start getting hammered, I'm going to assume that they pull out their patent portfolio. If I were them, I'd be making a *long* list of patents (including bogus ones) and going after Open Source projects. How many Open Source developers have the money to fight a lawsuit, or the $2.5K-$20K required to request a patent reexamination from the USPTO?

Furthermore, the social side effects of such a move would be wonderful for Microsoft. Open Source workers would be increasingly polarized against intellectual property law (which makes for *wonderful* PR). Any projects that are stopped serve as both PR and the practical elimination of a competitor. Any projects that continue (especially if they make arguments about not caring about "bullshit patents") can be used as examples of Open Source disregard for intellectual property and easily sued -- Microsoft has far more money to play with legal tactics than a small subset of open source developers do, even with OSDL/EFF/Red Hat backing (and a desperate Microsoft will probably commit more money than a less upset IBM -- especially an IBM with their own large collection of patents, some of which are surely bogus).

If I were Ken Brown, here's what I'd do to make a plausible case. I'd start identifying Microsoft patents (there are a lot to work with) and sending letters to open source developers. They don't even have to be project leads, but members of important projects would look nice. *Then* I'd send out letters saying "It looks like you're infrining on this patent", and quoting out-of-context bits of developer responses. Ken Brown wants to make a case against generally ethical and honest people, and do to that, he needs to exploit irrationality or incorrect beliefs. A good one is the current US patent system, which is generally believed to be excellent, but is actually fairly broken. By saying "there's a patent against this, and you can't make this", he has an *excellent* set of attacks against software.

As an even bigger benefit, Microsoft doesn't need to look like a bad guy (sending out patent threats) or risk estoppel or patent invalidation by claiming that an FLOSS project is infringing on their patents and losing.

Open Source developers are *very* open. In general, our conversational abilities as a society are not yet adapted to the open nature of communication on forums -- we are adjusted to people that maintain a "public stance" and a private stance, and that our messages are forgotten after a while, rather than flawlessly and publically retained for decades. Mr. Brown could go back to Google Groups archives, and dig all sorts of nasty, infringing, and flamebait messages from major figures, finding quotes from Cox or

That's right, mod him up...

[roystgnr]

I wonder how many of the moderators think your post is funny, and how many moderators just think it will be funny to read AdTI's next insane rant: "New Study Reveals that Linus Torvalds Supporters are Murderers"

Good old fashioned propaganda

[Yonder Way]

Ken Brown has, in this article, completely exposed himself for what he is; a propagandist. He is the paid puppet of a party hostile to Linux and GNU-licensed software. Don't take my word for it. Read the article. Check out the sort of contemptful words used when describing anything to do with Linux or Linus Torvalds.

Anyone with half a clue can read a little ways into this and see that this is just one or more large software companies hiding and using a (poor) stick puppet to try to put some legitimacy on their dirty tactics.

Ken Brown will do anything possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Fortunately Ken Brown is immensely stupid/unintelligent.
Anyone with a sound mind and a minimal knowledge of the facts, regardless of their position on this subject, would agree with me.
This /is/ indeed a hatchet job.

Re:Intentionally ambiguous use of the word "derive

[SmurfButcher Bob]

A word of advice -

Stop saying "In much the same way that OpenOffice imitates Microsoft Office". Tell the truth, instead -

"In much the same way that Excel imitates Visicalc, and in much the same way that Word imitates WordPerfect, WordStar, Magic Window, and AppleWriter, and in much the same way that InternetExploder imitates Netscape (and every other browser that was written prior to IE's writing, like the one that was built into AOL), and in much the same way that IIS tries to imitate Apache, and in much the same way that MSN Msgr imitates ICQ (and the original AOL chatrooms before that, and IRC before that), and in much the same way that MSExchange imitates a real mail server, and in much the same way that MS DNS service imitates BIND, and in much the same way that MSPaint imitates DRHalo (and 50 million other bitmap editors), and in much the same way that the MS Mouse drivers imitate the original Mouse Systems mouse driver from days long past, and in much the same way that DOS (and still Windows to this day, can you say "Hello PSP!" Never mind the command prompt) imitates CP/M, and in much the same way that Win32 imitates a real multitasking kernel..."

Always demonstrate a point with examples that leave no room to maneuver. If the toad (Brown) wants to equate "derived via concept" with theft, then let him... then simply provide examples that make his sponsors look even more horrid afterward, in a way which cannot be refuted when his own argument is applied. :)

And bonus points will be awarded if you can find a way to do it (unlike me) that involves decent grammar.

BSD vs GPL

[Wade Tregaskis]

It sounds to me like the non-too-subtle purpose of the controversial report is to promote BSD-style licenses over GPL (copyleft) ones. So if you can bear with me for a moment and ignore the issues of theft and whatever, the report is ultimately still pro-free-source. Just free as in freedom, true freedom, not the hypocritical so-called "free source" the FSF pushes. No wonder it's inciting such a response from that very community.

From my point of view, granted as a proponent of the BSD-style licenses, what I've read of the report seems reasonably valid. I'm prepared to take Linus' word that he wrote Linux, but it's undeniable that the early hacker ethic and rebellion against the establishment doesn't cast a favourable light over that generation. Imho, the kind of "borrowing", or more aptly put "inspiration", between different sources and histories is an essential part of modern free-source coding... it's naturally at ends with the capitalist model that prevailed through the corporate heads at that time, and that's probably the only reason why any of this is a real issue.

Then again, it's an interesting thought exercise - if I grabbed the latest copy of Linux (the kernel, the true "Linux"), and rewrote it in my own words, so to speak.. then posted that derived version as truly free (e.g. BSD licensed), who amongst the GPL and Linux crowd wouldn't scream blue murder?

The only enemy of true freedom is hypocracy.

Re:BSD vs GPL

[ross axe]

Then again, it's an interesting thought exercise - if I grabbed the latest copy of Linux (the kernel, the true "Linux"), and rewrote it in my own words, so to speak.. then posted that derived version as truly free (e.g. BSD licensed), who amongst the GPL and Linux crowd wouldn't scream blue murder?

If you wre to write a brand new kernel (using Linux for nothing more than inspiration) then you are of course free to use whatever licensing terms you want. If you copy code from Linux and change the license then there may well be strenuous objections. That's just obvious.

Exactly how does this relate to the accusations made by Ken Brown?

Re:BSD vs GPL

[Wade Tregaskis]

Well, I suppose that's a fair critique of my comment; I didn't really present my point very clearly, I know.

What I meant was, if I sat down with the Linux kernel and essentially "paraphrased it", i.e. read each functional unit one by one, and then rewrote my own - without any direct copying - but functionally identical to the original, how would it sit with different groups for me to then release that source as my own (under my own license)?

It seems clear that in a traditional corporate view this is quite clearly immorale, if not illegal. There is of course some degrees of grey even in this example, but nonetheless they're all pretty dark anyway.

From the point of view of the free source proponent, this is probably a perfectly valid thing to do - you're reinventing your own wheel, with practical inspiration from an existing one.

I personally imagine the FSF as leaning more towards the corporate case, to be honest. The GPL to me is just a way of enforcing your own philosophy on other people, which of course fails if I go and do some trivial workaround like the example given. They'd say I've broken the GPL in concept, if not in law.

I suppose I didn't have a sharp point with my original example... more I was trying to highlight all the hypocracy coming from every angle. Ken Brown is pushing BSD-licenses, while accusing Linus of "paraphrasing" Unix, which is infact the kind of sharing the BSD philosophy encourages. The idea of Linux "paraphrasing" Unix is offensive to Linux, the FSF and most open-sourcies (mainly because they want to protect Linus at all costs, I suspect). So the irony here is that Ken Brown is accusing Linus of doing what he thinks is just fine anyway, and the Linux community is getting up in arms about it because *they're* the ones who's philosophy's been violated.

Since I'm a BSD-loving Mac user, I'm sort of once-removed from all this, so I can look and laugh. I don't mean to offend those involved with my indifference - I'd just love to see them embrace the entire problem, rather than hiding behind their stubborn walls of pre-scripted defenses and inflamed heads. While Mr. Brown's methods may leave a lot to be desired, it's no reason to discount his opinion universally. And vice versa, of course.

Sadly, I feel Mr. Brown is making more considerations for his opponents than they for him. Not much more, mind you, given his relative lack of response to the whole issue, but some.

Re:BSD vs GPL

[ross axe]

What did GNU do but create a functional equivalent of Unix, piece by piece, until they had an almost complete replacement. What are Wine & ReactOS doing today? The same thing, but with Windows. This is, of course, not limited to OSS projects - Microsoft are an obvious example of a company who did not hestiate to take from others and 'relicense'. Not exactly a shining example of morality, I know, but instead illustrates the point that morality means rather little in the corporate world, as does the law if you've got enough money behind you.

Yes, it would be hypocritical to complain if someone merely cloned Linux, but consider, who would complain? Remeber, the 'GPL people' are not all of one mind. RMS is an idealist, he, clearly, would like nothing better than to see all software licensed under the GPL, hence the GPL's so-called viral nature. He, not unlike the large companies, would like to see everyone playing by his rules. But they are a very different set of rules. Linus has a more pragmatic view, he allows non-GPL'd drivers to be used with the kernel; something RMS would doubtless resist tooth & nail if someone tried to do the same for the HURD. Linus uses proprietary version management software, which RMS would never do while Free alternatives existed. GNU/Linux is a marriage of convenience, each is dead without the other. RMS would much rather the HURD was usable today, Linus wants whatever works.

The GPL means different things to different people, to the idealist it's a way to ensure the freedom of software, to the pragmatist it's a way to get something back for what (s)he has put in. BSD licensing ensures neither of these. Fair enough, if you write something then license it however you want.

FWIW, I don't think that Linus, RMS or any other 'GPL people' feel that Linus would have been justified in voilating the copyright of others, which is what Brown seems to be saying here. Even if he's not saying it explicitly, he's making some very strong implictions of foul play.

Now to Ken Brown. Why do you suppose he's apparently pushing the BSD license? Well, I'm afraid that I'm going along with the mob here and labelling this as a paid hatchet job. The GPL is a threat to MS, unlike BSD which can be leveraged in commercial applications, as MS may well have done in their TCP stack and Apple have done more recently with OS X (although, it must be said, more openly). The reason I would tend to discount Brown's opinion is his deliberate ignorance of the facts of the case, combined with his tendancy to lower himself to name-calling. Coming hot on the heels of SCO, we're just fed up to the back teeth of endless FUD. And if you think that Brown has the best interests of the BSD community in mind, think again.

I don't feel that a BSD-loving Mac user is really too much further from this issue than a Linux-loving PC user.

Oh well, end of ramble I guess.

All Your Code Are Belong to Us

[BigFire]

Not if Ken Brown subscribes to SCOX/Caldera's legal theory of All Your Code Are Belong to Us. If Linus even heard of the word Minix, and then writes Linux, he's guilty of ripping off Minix.

The more I surf adti.net...

[Crazy Eight]

the more I laugh. Check out http://www.adti.net/samizdat/samizdat.updates.html . Of four "updates" to the swirl surrounding "Samizdat" two are still "under construction" and one is a report on a DOS attack written in the third person (Crazy Eight doesn't like it when people talk about themselves that way) that can't help inventing an opportunity to use the phrase "hybrid source"!

Re: Nope --- MOD PARENT UP!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is IMHO the best argument against calling distros "GNU/Linux."

GNU has always referred to their project with that name, but they have never made it a condition of using the code that you name your derivative work accordingly.

Parent is right, GPL lets us name our derivative works anything we like. I would call Linux (as an OS) a variant of GNU, much as SunOS is a variant of BSD.

Just imagine if Berkeley had insisted, with no prior indication in licence or source code, that it should have been called "BSD/SunOS." Sun would have told them to get knotted!

Did Ken Brown really write this?

[martin-boundary]

The web page suggests Ken Brown is the author of this document, but is he really?

Reading the web page, some parts of it seem to me too disjoint to have been written by a single person. I'd be unsurprised if it was written by an employee or two, and Ken edited a few sentences afterwards to enhance the heat.

Some paragraphs are written in impersonal style, others in third person using AdTI as the subject, and others are written as first person accounts. This is most noticeable in the beginning and the end.

There's also the inconsistent use of vocabulary. For example, Brown's first person style doesn't suggest he would ever use the word "cool", but that word is used quite freely in one of the last paragraphs, with AdTI as the subject.

Finally, Brown is happy to raise doubts about Tannenbaum's character in the middle of the piece, while writing from first person, but just before the summary he switches to third person and apologizes, which looks to me like some editor is trying to limit the potential libel earlier in the piece.

It just feels like the document was written by several people and not edited sufficiently to be smooth overall. If that's so, he could at least acknowledge his coauthors. On the other hand, maybe he cut and pasted from internet sources? It's been done before.

Re:Did Ken Brown really write this?

[Tony-A]

"Isn't fair to question the character and ethics of individuals that espouse contempt for intellectual property? Isn't fair to question their character, when the core of their business strategy is trust?"

Hmmmmmm.

A report in the spirit of Alexis de Tocqueville

[Daath]

This report seems to be in line with Alexis de Tocqueville's 'famous words': The public will believe a simple lie rather than a complex truth .
Only, the lie has gotten a bit complex, hasn't it?

ken brown: photograph?

[flacco]

i'd like to see what this douchebag looks like, but there's nothing on google.

Created from scratch!=Created in a vaccuum.

[UnknowingFool]

Tannebaum and other stalwarts of computing support the claim that Linus created Linux. Ken Brown just doesn't get it or doesn't care.

Brown: No one could have created an entire OS by themselves.
Tannebaum: Um, five people did it independently of each other.
Brown: Exactly! Those five people were computer experts not some wet-behind-the-ears kid.
Tannebaum: By that time, Unix specifications were well known. Anybody could have done it with my book, the POSIX standard, and other Unix books.
Brown: See! He copied code, didn't he!

Again and again, Brown sticks by his argument that Linux is so complex that no one could have done it all alone. He doesn't see the 14 years of development it took for Linux to be what it is. He doesn't see that Linux has been re-written over the years as Linus and others expanded it. He doesn't understand Linux is a movement started by Linus and maintained informally by him, but the work done in it has been done by practically thousands of people.

If you use "SIM"...

[Crazy Eight]

... it's like comparing one project's code base with a totally different one written by someone else. That's what Alexey Toptygin did with MINIX and Linux. His results are here . His commentary on the results are illuminating since he made the comparison specifically for Ken Brown's pamphlet only to find that his conclusion wasn't appreciated.

Unreliable sources??

[Anonymous Coward]

I like this quote from Brown:
Another problem with Tanenbaum's logic ...

OK, so he's reputable enough to quote for your study..

However, he has flawed logic, so you can't trust what he says...

er.. um.. :-)

Hmmmm...

[Timex]

I'm guessing that this is a dupe, because of how long it's been since it was put online, but i'll say it anyway:

Brown has to be on some serious crack. Why else would he choose to contradict people who know what they are talking about? This guy seems to know less about operating systems than _I_ do... ...and although I couldn't write one by myself, I know that it is possible by anyone that has a clue how to do it...

My e-mail to Ken Brown

[linhux]

(yes, I really did end it abruptly like that - unfortunalty, I forgot to end the mail and include a signature)

Dear Mr Brown,

I would like to address a few things in your reply to critics made
available on . I have not addressed every claim you make, as I am without sufficient knowledge and time to respond to all of them. I do, however, make a best effort to provide some commentary and criticism of your article, in the hope this e-mail, complemented with similar commentaries made by others who have read your article, will give you some insight into the reality of the claims you make.

You are repeatedly claiming that an MIT or BSD style license is some kind of "true open source". "Open Source" is a trademark owned by the Open Source Initiative. The term "open source" is specifically coined to cover GPL, MPL and similar license, in addition to the BSD and MIT licenses you refer to.

> The United States is the home of the United States Patent and
> Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency which
> contributes to the worldwide effort to protect and govern
> intellectual property.

On the contrary, the United States Patent and Trademark Office is
among many seen as an anti-example of IP protection bureaucracy. It is
commonly known that the USPTO repeatedly has accepted many patent claims
with little or no credit and invention value.

> "Hybrid source code" is a phrase coined by former Tocqueville
> Chairman Gregory Fossedal. The term refers to any product with a
> license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the
> same time.

I fail to see where you can attribute this property to the GPL (or
similar licenses). The GPL explicitly forbids mixing of propriety and
free source code.

> Hybrid source code can never be true intellectual property.

Whatever license you choose for the redistribution your piece of art, as
long as you retain your copyright (which you must in order to enforce a
license on the redistribution), you never lose your intellectual
property, since the copyright is still yours, and you are, for example,
free to also redistribute the same artwork under different conditions.
See, for example, MySQL for a successful business that releases its
database source code under GPL as well as sells it to partners under
other license conditions.

> The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as
> private property, which makes the hybrid source model significantly
> different from true open source.

I cannot see where in your text you have the basis for this accusation.
The GPL (nor any other OSI certified license) does not force the
copyright owner to waive any of his or her rights to the art work.

On the contrary, the _actual_ purpose of Open Source, and GPL
specifically, is to increase its value as it enables external entities
to contribute to your artwork. The contributors may retain their own
intellectual property rights (copyright) and rest assured that thanks to
the GPL, their private property may never be misused without their
knowledge. If someone wishes to use a GPL-licensed artwork in conditions
that the GPL does not satisfy, they are free to negotiate other license
conditions with the copyright owner, as they are with any copyrighted
work. MIT and BSD licenses, however, does not give any guarantee that
your property will not be used without any form of compensation (in the
GPL case, the compensation is the GPL compliance in itself: as long as
the GPL retains, proper attribution is retained and credit is where
credit is due).

Although I personally use the MIT license for my own Open Source
projects, that style of software licensing is the only case where I can
see the term "hybrid source" actually apply to the current set of Open
Source licenses.

> The hybrid source model negatively impacts the intellectual property

Brown says it himself...

[ImpTech]

LOL, I'm only halfway through, and already this "response to critics" is nothing more than a pile of invective and blatant FUD. Not even clever FUD, the dumb "how can we trust them" kind.

This quote is beautiful though:

> The point of the paper is to magnify potential problems associated with this type of software development.

Key word there is "magnify". Not impart, not highlight, not discuss. Magnify!

Re:Brown says it himself...

[roman_mir]

Well, he is an expert in the sciense of ... nameology.

Beyond parody...

[Bored Huge Krill]

Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector. Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well.

I barely know where to start with such rampant twaddle as this. I'll try to go through it line by line...

Linux is a leprosy

no, no, no, Ken. Check your song sheet again. It's cancer remember?

and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry

BWAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA...

Whatever could you mean, Ken? Could you be possibly be talking about our friends in the North I mean, North West? I think we should be told. Ken, just because some companies find it hard to compete with something that provides the same thing they do at lower cost, why is that necessarily bad?

because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector

I'm not sure what you mean here. You seem to have put an economics for dummies book in a blender and selected some random effluent thereof. Do you really mean value here, or the ability of some particular companies to make money with their old business model? News flash: this is what happens to industries that can't or won't change their business model when a lower cost paradigm for doing the same thing comes along. They die. I don't know of anybody who talks about this kind of disruptive influence as destryoying value; it is, in fact, exactly the reverse. It reduces cost, and prices - but it increases the value.

Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well.

Well, your premise is wrong, as described above - but even if it wasn't, this is a completely ridiculous leap. Once again, you are confusing (deliberately?) the concepts of value, cost and price. They are not the same thing. In fact, free software (what you like to call "hybrid" software for reasons known only to you) is routinely used today by hardware manufacturers in exactly the kinds of devices you describe. They run, not walk, to use it. Why do you suppose that is? Are they stupid? Or is it perhaps because they understand the difference between the concepts that you so readily confuse? Hardware manufacturers use free software in such embedded applications because it reduces the cost of their products, while at the same time actually increasing the value, because they can devote their software resources to developing value-added applications (which don't have to be released under the GPL as you have inferred) instead. You're also ignoring one rather important distinction between software and hardware: whilst the marginal cost of manufacturing software approaches zero, the same is not true of hardware. The price of each item is dictated by the market, and, in a maximally efficient market approximates the lowest price at which any manufacturer can sell the product. Embedded software having a marginal cost approaching zero will certainly encourage their competitors to seek similar zero-cost embedded software in order to compete - but it has no bearing on the market price of the hardware. That market pressure only occurs when your competitors find ways to reduce the cost of their hardware and lower the price accordingly. There simply isn't any connection between the software and hardware pricing.

I would write a critique of the rest of the "article", but frankly the idiocy-per-paragraph density makes this a rather onerous task. Just pointing out the nonsense in one short paragraph took a rather voluminous amount of text.

hindsight as property

[epine]

I once read it purported that a truism of the aircraft design industry is that you never design an engine and an airframe in tandem if you can possibly avoid it: design a new engine for an existing airframe, or design a new airframe for an existing engine. Designing a new engine for a new airframe at the same time is a recipe for disaster.

AFAIC every article I skimmed from this thread has fallen for the same the bait: asking "how hard is it to design a jet engine for the first time" in isolation of having a proven airframe on which to afix that engine.

When the ATT crowd first wrote Unix, they didn't have a large body of proven userland code against which to validate their concepts and implementation strategy.

I would imagine that Linus had access to a considerable amount of solid userland source code written within according to Unix conventions. In particular, if he was using gcc, he most likely had access to the source code for glibc, which most likely--if you were to view it from the right perspective--can tell you a lot about the required kernel semantics governing process creation.

Glibc has less to say about virtual memory semantics. Around the time of the 386/33 I became very interested in the i386 page table model and eventually that lead to some interesting experimentation under the DOS4G 32-bit DOS extender (which came bundled with the Watcom C compiler). I had to read the Intel documentation carefully, and conduct careful experiments to prove my understanding, but I didn't regard mastering the page table semantics of the i386 architecture as an earth shattering accomplishment. Despite the i386 VM model not being generally regarded in favorable terms (eg. executable stack segments), it was a solid realization of what a modern Unix-style kernel requires as a memory management foundation.

I think if you were to examine the kernel closely, for each major design issue that would have troubled those involved in the early implementations, there were "airframes" in the environment that embodied the wisdom that had been aquired over several decades that weren't the original ATT source kernel sources, or sources derived from those influences.

The difference with the GNU/Hurd is that Stallman wanted to design an *innovative* kernel. Linus accomplished more because he more in tune with following the path of least resistance.

I also found it interesting that Linux was declared a form of leprosy. This is a mistaken attribution. Leprosy was invented by RMS long before Linus joined the party.

The two main flaws I find in this argument are the overemphasis and misunderstanding of attribution, and the failure to acknowledge that an awe inspiring accomplishment of one generation becomes a toy for the next. Innovation lies in recognizing when the time is ripe to challenge conventions.

Computer science in the 1970s was in much the same shape as athletic instruction. A friend of mine recently asked his father how he trained for the 400 yard dash. He replied, "My coach told me 'run faster!'" These days junior track athletes challenge professional standards from not that long ago, and it isn't entirely roids.

I was also amused because I remember very clearly in the early eighties the myth circulating about Bill Gates (when he was worth millions not billions) about how he had programmed BASIC on some kind of simulator at Harvard and when he plugged his BASIC EPROM chip into the S100 era hodgepodge, it worked the first time. Gates was heralded as the geeky 21 year old who build a billion dollar empire on IBM's home turf. Could it be done in the mind of any rational human being? Absolutely not.

I think what needs to be granted is that the art of software is 90% hindsight, and that the truest form of attribution is to make slight the contributions of those who troiled before, who did the same to their precursors, too.

I think there is no greater validation of the traditions Unix represents than the fact that a 21 year old

Typical dilletant.

[missing_boy]

I glossed over Ken Brown's response today (http://www.adti.net/samizdat/brown.reply.june.04. html), and while I have to admit that I'm not programming buff in any respect, this guy seems to be totally out to lunch, a word-twister! He's turning the whole Tannenbaum interview(s) in his favour, although it was pretty clear from Tannenbaum's own website that A.T. considers Brown and his work-ethics and research methods to be boink, at best, sketchy perhaps. The only sign of intelligence that I see is in the signature, where he quotes A.T. and says (talking about himself):

He is reportedly "not the sharpest knife in the drawer," but nevertheless is able to converse with many intelligent people, and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world.

What's a think-tank, anyway? I thought it was an independent, open-minded place with smart people working there (although seriously right-wing)?

Ken Brown is the Ebeneezer Scrooge of IP

[mhackarbie]

The debate about whether Linus Torvalds wrote Linux is just bait to keep the issue in the headlines. The real aim of Ken Brown and his supporters is to wage an ideological battle over the nature of intellectual property.

His flawed reasoning and poor judgement are too extensive for me to go into detail. I think the best way to summarize the error of his position is to compare him to Ebeneezer Scrooge, the greedy miser whose excessive concern with wealth blinded him to the truly important things in life.

The growth of information technology is part of a greater world of creative activity that includes science, art, music, literature and more. A critical requirement for continued creative work and innovation is an environment which enables the healthy flow of ideas between people.

Capitalism and the profit-motive play a part in enabling such creative activity, by helping to channel resources more effectively, but I maintain that the role of business and profit is strictly secondary. The true source of innovation starts with people who are passionate about creativity and discovery.

The great success of Science in the last several centuries has been critically dependent upon open communication and a free flow of ideas. The great success of software development in the last several decades has likewise been dependent upon an open environment for exploration and communication of new ideas.

Both of these creative activities are threatened by legal mechanisms such as patents and copyrights, which were originally intended to promote and reward innovation, but lately are mostly a means of protecting entrenched economic power.

I am not against Capitalism or rewarding creative endeavor, just as I presume Ken Brown is not against creativity or technological innovation. It all comes down to where you focus your energy. In Ken's (and Ebeneezer's) world, there is an obsessive emphasis is on building legal mechanisms and protecting corporate profits, at the expensive of an environment that can give birth to new innovations.

In my world, the focus is on the conditions that foster creativity and innovation, and subsequently deriving profit from the fruits made possible by those conditions.

Which world do we want to live in?

mhack

Re: Robert X. Cringely

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I know he's a bit self-absorbed, but he has a good track record of investigative journalism in the computer industry, and he's willing to expose ulterior motives of the players.

Because it's being paid for

[msobkow]

The timing of the attacks is obviously being paid for by someone.

Someone who has previously funded discredited research through the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.

Someone who previously invested large sums of money in SCO, leaving a debt to be called in the future.

Someone who is busy patenting common-sense user interactions using mice and GUI's.

Someone with the clout to buy a reprieve from justice, and treat the penalties as merely the cost of doing business, and likely calculated into the projected expense budgets.

I mean come on -- why settle for mere greed or glory-hounding when there is a perfectly good conspiracy theory out there.

Besides, the tack Brown has taken is entirely self-destructive. Glory hounds want attention, not to paint themselves as the village idiot, repeating blatant lies as if they're a defense against the criticisms levied by respected members of the IT community. If the man truly believes his "response" appears like a rational defense, he seriously neds help, and I hope he gets it soon.

Yes, I read the whole article. The use of buzz-phrases is interesting.

What happens when you Google those phrases? Has the reference to the report shown up in the search results yet? How long until it does, with all the news sites cross-referencing the trash information?

Fast forward a few weeks when the furor dies down and an "apology" is issued. Someone searches for those key phrases -- is this "reasoned argument" response still visible in the search results? Maybe long enough to influence a few people to accept it as fact because it achieved such a high Google ranking with all the cross-references?

Remember the people doing those searches likely don't have technical knowledge to realize the "research" is virtually non-existant. They've heard about this Linux thing, and SCO, and look -- here's a high-rated "Institution" report.

I think the combination of SCO and Brown's report are the most elegantly crafted FUD attack I've seen to date, and one of the most subtle. It even uses the OSS community's own outrage to boost it's ranking and visibility.

Now just imagine you could actually control a search engine and make sure only the "right" links show up in the results, with one or two mild detractions to appear balanced. How much Google stock would one need to buy to ensure that kind of control?

Sure it's all ranting conspiracy stuff, but it's amazing how such theories fit sometimes, isn't it?

Re:Because it's being paid for

[Tony-A]

"Kenneth Brown is president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution ... and is accepted at fine restaurants and hotels around the world."
See subject.

"However, building a product that starts with the accomplishment of others and announcing it as completely your own work product, is not invention, nor is it innovation."
Sounds like Microsoft.

"Another problem with Tanenbaum's logic is that he only presents examples of people that were Unix licensees, had Unix source code, or who were exceptionally familiar with software development. He cannot provide one example reasonably comparable to the Torvalds case."
This actually makes it all the more likely that Linus wrote it himself. If he had the programming experience and familiarity with Unix sources, what Linus accomplished in one year would have taken him about three years. The fastest way to comprehend something is to build it from scratch, Ever had a maintenance project where the best and easiest way was to redo it from scratch. How much of the original wound up in the redo?
Young, talented, energetic, driven. Reasonable outcome. I doubt that it can be repeated on demand, but all it takes are a few key insights and fortuitous choices early in the game.

"Unix is one of the greatest achievements in the history of computer science."
By being onery enough to have outlived its betters. No disrespect to its creators, but Unix (and C) stink to high heaven. Unix is a poor man's Multics and C is a poor man's ALGOL68. C is compilable and Unix is writable and useable. The quote something like "Those who do not learn Unix are doomed to reinvent it. Badly." may well be accurate in that correctness drags along a sufficient overabundance of complexity to make it unatainable. In that case, Brown's rant against "hybrid source" is totally wrong.

"The hybrid source model negatively impacts the intellectual property model for all software, and inevitably the entire IT economy."
The same way potable water from the city mains impacts the viability of bottled water. Seems like RedHat isn't doing too badly while the exact same software is available from White-Box? and some others. My understanding is that Linux itself is GPL, hardly fitting any reasonable definition of "hybrid source model". I would imagine that installations use some mixture of BSD, GPL and proprietary software. Solaris with GNU utilities is "hybrid source model"?

Re:Because it's being paid for

[j-pimp]

"The hybrid source model negatively impacts the intellectual property model for all software, and inevitably the entire IT economy." The same way potable water from the city mains impacts the viability of bottled water. Seems like RedHat isn't doing too badly while the exact same software is available from White-Box? and some others. My understanding is that Linux itself is GPL, hardly fitting any reasonable definition of "hybrid source model". I would imagine that installations use some mixture of BSD, GPL and proprietary software. Solaris with GNU utilities is "hybrid source model"?
Uh ok, I think Kenn means the GPL when he refers to hybrid software. Perhaps I misunderstood the article, but he seems to attack the "viral" nature of the GPL and labels that has hybrid software. Now, personally I would consider that purebred software. Auctualyl I would consider somethign like Qmail purebred software.

Re:Because it's being paid for

[Tony-A]

Yep, looks like he invented the term "hybrid source model" specifically to denigrate the GPL. The GPL is viral in the sense of a limitied life form. A GPL'd program will live on as long as somebody, anybody, has an interest in keeping it alive. If several people have different incompatible ideas of what it should be, it will multiply (divide?) like the Hydra.

Qmail is definitely purebred, and licensed to stay that way.

In general, seems like computer systems are extremely inbred. This from about 30-40 years ago and it can have only gotten more so. Seems like some cross-breeding is desirable, maybe even essential to long-term survival.

Re:Because it's being paid for

[CmdrGravy]

Yes I think that is what he means as well, he seems to prefer a system whereby the government pays Universities etc to create "open source" which can then just be incorporated into commercial software as and how the software companies like.

This sounds to me like he's suggesting that the US government pay Microsoft and others 5 Billion dollars a year to spend on coding there software which I'm sure would be a very nice thing for Microsoft.

Re:Because it's being paid for

[j-pimp]

In general, seems like computer systems are extremely inbred. This from about 30-40 years ago and it can have only gotten more so. Seems like some cross-breeding is desirable, maybe even essential to long-term survival. Well it looks like all the growth is occuring in innovation causing mutations. I never touch true big iron, but after operating an AS/400 for a while, it seems like their borrowing from our Unix/Windows ideas more than we are borrowing from them. Their are alot of new OSes, and some stuff does find its way into the "mainstream ones," but other than BEOS, what new OS had a shot of making it past few years. The embedded areana is a place for new OSes, but how long befor eWindows and linux conquor that. Remember when NetBSD was the OS to run on "eccentric" hard ware. Now its debian.

Credibility of ATocqueville Institute

[HugePenguin]

Incredible how everyone reacts so strongly to the comments of someone/some organization who, seemingly and until now, had practically nothing to do with the IT industry. Basically an idiot's comment on the market place that sets the village ablaze with terror!

I've gone to the Tocqueville Institute's web site ,which happens to be half working (for example, see the accomplishments link here: http://www.adti.net/mission.html). I truly believe that an organization that takes itself so seriously (and this one must since it has the audacity to criticize something about which it obviously has no clue), should at least be able to maintain their web site. And if this makes you smile too, keep looking on their(cheap and less than professional) web site and you might notice other funny little oddities.

Even the brightest among us woke up for the occasion! If only real issues could do the same!! What about real solutions and suggestions about the need for the co-existence of the traditional business model (which has lost its pants being so afraid of linux and co.) and the new model proposed by the "Open Source" community?

Back to our sheep:
A quick citation:

"Le propre de l'idiot est de ne jamais se laisser desarconner et de trancher souverainement de tout ce qui lui echappe." (If I remember correctly, this is from Louis Aragon "Les Cloches de Bales").

A quick and dirty translation: An idiot is someone who does not know when to give up and is someone who will always a pass "royal" judgement on a subject about which he has no knowledge.

Does that sound familliar Ken?

Ken Brown may be a twit, but...

[AB3A]

...he's a very wiley and literate twit. The prose he makes up (and it is really no more than that) does have a certain self consistency which reads very convincingly if you didn't know any of the background.

I have to admire the careful way he dances around the issue of Intellectual Property Rights. It's a fact of life that when your IP hits digital media, it becomes very easy to make perfect copies on an individual basis for next to nothing besides the cost of bandwidth.

Unfortunately, that fact of life is becoming a serious concern to everyone with a stake in intellectual property of their own. Ken Brown uses this fear very adroitly by saying that giving away software for free devalues other software.

What he doesn't realize is that the software industry really isn't about software. It's about service. Anyone who has ever had a plumber visit their house to make repairs knows that the vast majority of the bill has almost nothing to do with the parts, and everything to do with getting someone there armed with tools and experience to fix the problem.

Similarly, the RIAA would have us think that it's all about the parts, not the performers. But ask any professional musician across the economic spectrum and they'll all tell you that they make their real money going on tour.

Ken Brown would have us think it's about the parts, not the people. He may be pushing an agenda full of half truths, but he's not stupid.

His view is panders to those who insist on thinking that the plumber is just selling them bits of pipe, a valve and a washer or two; the electrician is just selling wire, boxes, outlets, and wire nuts; and the software industry is selling a box with a CD in it.

The real problem

[lemsip]

We all know that this is a massively flawed document, and any one of us could rip it to pieces on dozens of points. But handed over to someone of influence, who isn't armed with the understanding of open source, UNIX history and the way software development works, couldn't it appear credible? Handed to a person of influence in the government along with another hundred documents, couldn't the truth simply now shine through? I worry about this.

Yes and No

[WindBourne]

Yeah, it is somewhat dangerous. But it can be countered. Take a look at IDC and Gartner 4 years ago. This totally illogical and funded attack against Linux be them, has almost assuredly cost them a great deal of standing. In essence, they gave up much of their future to gain a few bucks. Now you have a number of conservative think tanks that are coming out against Linux with nothing but FUD. Sadly, this will be reflected later against them and where they had influence, they will have little. But if we keep the anti-fud campaign going, and even take it to congress ( the presidency is totally in MS's front pocket, at this time), it will be possible to sway a number of the politicians. And yes, both sides need lots of education.

No one understands the software industry

[defile]

Most programmers don't even figure this out, so non-programmers are a lost cause, but I'll keep patiently repeating this:

The makeup of the Software Industry is that 95% (or more) of the software developed in the world today is sold to single buyers. The remaining 5%, which most analysts mistakenly characterize as the ENTIRE software industry, is shrinkwrap software like Windows or Adobe Photoshop.

While open source directly threatens the shrinkwrap (5%) software industry, it has enormous positive impact on the custom software (95%) sector. Remember, since it's sold to single buyers (developed in-house by the company or under contract) so if it incorporates GPL or BSD licensed code, IT IS IRRELEVANT! Custom systems are almost never resold because a) the client is usually not in the software business, and b) the software is usually useful only in the original buyer's environment, and is custom tailored for their individual needs.

GET IT THROUGH YOUR HEADS, OPEN SOURCE IS ONLY A REMOTE THREAT, AND ONLY TO SHRINKWRAP SOFTWARE VENDORS! Microsoft is worried, Oracle is concerned, Siemens, IBM, and consultants like me who write and sell code every day sure aren't.

Re:No one understands the software industry

[pjkundert]

Absolutely correct (although I can't confirm your percentages...)

I work with Linux and a multitude of other FOSS sofware every day, developing embedded solutions for a large company. Most will never see the light of day (they are pretty specific to our company/industry), but FOSS software makes it all possible. Any parts that are generic, I am making available as FOSS (under the GPL). WIthout FOSS, we would be using some crappy closed source solution, without a fraction of the capability of what we've been able to build on top of Linux, et. al.

Incidentally, we spend large amounts of money buying some "closed" solutions (that run on Linux) from other companies; I suspect that they enjoy the income! Linux doesn't seem to be destroying their economic model.

The only companies that are going to get hurt, and badly, are those companies that have stopped innovating, and are just trying to milk an existing position for all they can get out of it. Any company or individual that actually wants to innovate, can now enter the marketplace much, much more easily than they could before, by building on top of an ever larger foundation of FOSS.

I think we can all guess what type of entity doesn't want that to happen...

Re:No one understands the software industry

[Anonymous Coward]

You have data, right?

95% measured how? Total number of lines written? Total number of "applications" written? Total number of copies sold? Revenue generated? Bugs? WTF?

Re: who is paying him to write this crap?

[Anonymous Coward]

>> We know what agenda MS is pushing but what does the republican party have against open source?

The Republicans are pro-business, by which I mean "pro-greed." That is to say, they object to any obstruction of the pursuit of profits. It's considered a god-given right that you can do anything and everything in your power to get rich.

To Republicans, "freedom," "laissez-faire," and "free markets" are synonymous and translate into "no rules."

If you're in business and anyone tries to stop your attempts to stamp out your competition, the Republicans cry foul.

The aim is to target GPL !!!

[hdante]

I didn't read Ken Brown's reply fully, but it seems that he's trying to aim GPL. If you try to change every term "hybrid source" to "GPL source", things will make better sense. Every sentence with "GPL source" fits, except for its first definition, probably because he (or me) doesn't fully understand it.

The matter that he is trying to bring everybody about is that of economic nature. GPL makes getting more money from software than it actually costs impraticable and that's what he fears.

One of Brown's misrepresentations

[defile]

Furthermore in almost every interview with experienced computer science professionals, almost all said that they personally had a copy of the Lions notes, an illegal distribution of Unix source code.

Either Brown is an idiot or a liar, since he left some interesting information out of his report. This once illegal distribution was eventually published as a book, which I'm holding my lap right now. Here's an excerpt from the preface:

Thanks to the efforts of Dennis Ritchie, AT&T's lawyers stated that they had "no objection" to publication [of the Lions notes as a book]. Negotiations with Novell, purchasers of the UNIX system from AT&T, were sluggish. Then, late in 1995, came the announcement that The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. (SCO) had purchased UNIX from Novell. Dennis and I wrote to Mike Tilson and Doug Michels, executives at SCO we knew personally. Mike actually owned a copy of John Lions' work, treasured it, and within a short period of time had arranged with SCO's lawyers for permission.

It's truly amazing how far the name SCO has fallen since then, and how this shill can make such a blatant misrepresentation, and how much money he probably made doing it.

I wish someone would pay me to tell outrageous lies.

Re:One of Brown's misrepresentations

[Anonymous Coward]

Bear in mind that this is not the same company. The company formerly known as The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. is now known as Tarantella Inc. The company now known as Litigious Bastards oops I mean The SCO Group, Inc. is what used to be not Litigious Bastards I mean Caldera Systems Inc.

he can't code

[duncanmacvicar]

so why the hell is he talking about coding?

shut up Kenneth... you sound stupid. "The GNU team contributed their GCC compiler, a complicated product with over 110,000 lines of code to the Linux project. Without the compiler, it is very likely that the Linux project would not have succeeded."

there is not gcc code in linux. a compiler is a tool, just like you pick a hammer to build a wood house.

"How much 'inspiration' did Linus get from Minix? AdTI argues clearly enough to credit the Prentice Hall product."

How much inspiration did you get from idiots to write your bullshit Microsoft-sponsored articles?. You should credit all world morons too.

"For years, Linus is credited with being an inventor. AdTI argued the claim was false. Coincidently in a recent interview, Linus decided he was not the inventor of Linux commenting in a ZDNet story, "I'd agree that 'inventor' is not necessarily the right word...(9)""

He never said he is an inventor. You can't invent an operating system, you can implement one based on ideas, and Minix ideas were not invented by tanenbaum anyway. But like all journalists, you use the same technique. "J: Linus says he is the inventor" "Linus: no, I am not an inventor ... I..." "J: he said it! he said it! he is not the inventor of Linux!"

"However, building a product that starts with the accomplishment of others and announcing it as completely your own work product, is not invention, nor is it innovation. Innovation can only work properly if innovators properly credit the work of others"

Torvalds never announced an innovation. He did innovate in the way of how to lead a project with a mix of tirany and freedom that makes Linux both free, flexible and stable enough for almost all uses. Even his first post said it:

"As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has finally reached the stage where it's even usable" (google archive)

Can you read minix-lookalike? no you can't, ask Microsoft for some glasses then.

"Kenneth Brown is president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution and director of its technology research programs. He is the author of numerous research papers and popular articles on technology issues..."

learn to code or at least what is an operating system.. then talk, until that keep talking about technology in abstract... so you can say nothing and it will sound cool anyway. But when talking about unix, linux and free software, you sound dumb.

Ken Brown - Operating System Creationist.

[eddy]

Ken Brown is a Creationist. Like Christian Creationists, he misunderstand, lie, twist quotes, engage strawman arguments, pepper his writing with fallacies, redefines common terminology, and finally; refuse to provide any evidence for his outlandish claims.

For instance:

Christian Creationist: The human eye is too complex to have been created via evolution!

Operating System Creationist: Linux is too complex to have been written by one person from scratch!

In both contexts, the Fundy is not only wrong, they also add a twist to their wrongness. CC will always claim that evolution is "something from nothing", basically confusing abiogenesis with evolution. The OSC, likewise, will twist 'written from scratch' to mean 'written in a vaacuum with no tools and with a clean brain that's never been exposed to any information'

Another:

Christian Creationist: You weren't there, so you experts don't know -- but we home-schooled fake-PhDs do!

Operating System Creationist: You weren't there, so you computer science experts don't know -- but we English Majors do!

Ken Brown, OS Creationist.

Message from Mr Mackey (aka Linus)

[hayden]

"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people."
--Linus Torvalds

Best anti-drugs message I've ever heard.

The Crux Of His Argument Is Stupid

[FrankDrebin]

Samizdat concludes that the root of attribution, IP misappropriation, and acknowledgement problems in Linux is ---in fact--- the trust model.

Duh.

Is trust not the root of all distribution of IP "works"? When you sell your old paperbacks, do you check that the publisher had correctly and legally obtained the printing rights from the author and that you may legally pass the books on to others? When you give your folks a laptop for Christmas with WinXP do you follow the legal paper trail to be sure you and MS are in the clear IP-wise? Gimme a break.

What Mr. Brown seems to fail to understand is that even if IP is misappropriated, it's up to the owner to pursue the infringer in the courts. We all see how SCO, self-styled as the "owner" of Unix and the outfit best suited to pursue an IP issue with Linux, is faring. Open source makes IP ownership issues transparent since anyone suspecting a problem can look at the source and check it out. To wit, SCO's case is withering on the vine as the Linux codebase gets stronger with each passing day as scrutiny mounts. It's closed source that makes IP misappropriation hard to detect, not open source.

And besides, it's in every Linux booster's interest to vet the source for these problems... we simply don't want a tainted code base. It's essentially self-regulating. For those end-users who are still nervous about being sued when the use Linux... insurance is still cheaper than closed source, because you keep your soul.

How imperfect is rabid for a description?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only is he barking up the wrong tree, he knows that it is the wrong tree. I see the zealotry of the AdTI here, in the pusuit of money at the expense of the truth. Perhaps the sickness contained has a clearer metaphor with a disease other than rabies.

I see distortion for hire by the AdTI. The pathological and abhorrent behavior of Ken Brown is consistent with raibes.

The Best Response

[ewe2]

...is to take to heart the old dictum don't feed the trolls. He wants you to feed him stuff he can attack the community with. Anonymous, out of context defamation is his cherished goal. DON'T GIVE IT TO HIM. He wants government to buy it.

PJ's reaction should give a useful heads-up. The Gilbert and Sullivan parody should be mandatory singing all day today!

MOD UP

[Anonymous Coward]

This could become quite funny

Thou shalt not stand on the shoulders...

[Anonymous Bullard]

Thou shalt not stand on the shoulders of giants no more(*).

So has the US ultra-pro-business lobby decreeth on this merciful year of the Lord 2004.

(*)Unless it has been processed and approved by the glorious Patent Office of the United States of America. $insert waving flags$

Whores for More

[JInterest]

What's clear is that like all True Believers, Ken Brown will do anything possible to win, and he will never give up. He will not rest to his dying days to fight what he has started. He has put himself in a position he must defend. He is going to shout what he wants to anyone who will listen, and as most people are ignorant of the issue, many of them will.

I don't think you should assume that Brown is a True Believer.

A story about the "Whores for More" who pollute our public policy process.

In the late 1980's, I interned at a small but locally prominent "Beltway insider" political organization that was essentially a conservative/Republican foundation set up as a 501(c)(3) educational organization.

I was given a bird's eye view of how these groups, groups like ADTI, operate. Party or ideology aside, they all seem to work the same way.

It is all about money, ego, and, sometimes, ideas, precisely in that order.

I was amazed at how much time, effort, and energy was spent in the drive for getting money. Why did they need the money? To expand. For what purpose? To have more prominence and influence. Why? Well..it makes fundraising easier.

Don't misunderstand. I understood then and now that you need to raise money in order to operate. But I wasn't comfortable with the tactics used to obtain the money. The letters were frequently inflammatory and, I was surprised to find, sometimes simply wrong. The organization I was with wasn't the worst offender on that point, either. I saw some terrible stuff coming out of groups who were supposedly on the same side we were. There was certainly a lot for them to complain about, so why not keep it straight?

Moreover, I had open eyes, and I soon saw that there was a LOT of hypocrisy inside the Beltway. Many of these people pushed agendas that they didn't even come close to following.

Ego played a big role in all this. These "public policy" organizations are really an incestuous little bunch, where name-dropping, fancy titles, and building organizations with large fund-raising arms counted for more than substantive results. Any ideas that didn't come out of your "clique" were automatically bad. If you were part of the "clique", kissed the right asses, etc., you got ahead. If you weren't, don't bother, they weren't interested.

Appearances mattered. Real principles were a less important. When an Ohio congressman who was a noted conservative had to resign after being busted for having sex with a 13-year old black girl, there was a sympathy party for his staffers. All well and good, but for all the clucking of tongues, most of the comments were about how unfortunate it was that he'd done something that would hurt him politically. There was little comment on the fact that this married father had had sex with a young girl, and how just plain damn wrong that was. And nobody seemed to notice the hypocrisy. Why? Because of one too many people living in glass houses, preaching one thing for money and influence, and living another.

Where there ideas? Sure. There was a lot of talk. But the prevailing viewpoint was that principles should be compromised when it came time to "deal", because it was better to have something than nothing, right? And this is no doubt true, so long as compromise actually advances your ideas, but I noticed that many of the principles that these organizations pulled so many dollars from donors to support ended up in the waste basket when the time came to "deal".

I observed that this was a problem that crossed lines of party and ideology. Finding that policy wonking inside the Beltway was high-school magnified, played with millions of dollars and by people older than my parents, was disheartening to say the least.

"Whores for More" was and is my take on that experience after the fact. It is a take-off on the famous line by Bogart in Key Largo when he describes what motivated Edward G. Robinson's char

Re:Whores for More

[maximilln]

Nice assessment of the political money game. It doesn't work so differently in corporate America, either. Names and faces of the games change, but the method is typically the same. Hype, profit, move on. Hype, profit, move on. Profit feeds ego, ego feeds hype, hype feeds profit.

Re:Whores for More

[mhackarbie]

Thanks for an insightful look into one of the Beltway ideology tanks. I've always been curious how supposedly intelligent people can produce so much misleading and flawed work.

I've heard of a recent book by an ex-conservative journalist that exposes the corrupt process of right-wing media. You can read an exerpt here.

Perhaps someone needs to write another book that focuses on how policy organizations are running rampant with taxpayer funds inside the beltway.

mhack

can't believe my eyes

[Anonymous Coward]

This reply has upped my cynicism level up a notch.

Professor Tanenbaum did not convince AdTI that Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux kernel from scratch. We are sorry if this has caused any inconvenience to Professor Tanenbaum or anyone else.

This statment leads to only 3 possible conclusions:

1) Tanenbaum, a well respected professor, is for some odd reason lying covering up for Linux saying it didn't copy Minix when it really did. Perhaps as part of some global conspiracy by communist hippies who want to share useful, functional software with the world.

2) Ken Brown is more knowledgable about Operating Systems than Tanenbaum is and knows more about Minix than the creator of minix

3) Brown is talking out of his ass to make an impossible case for the benefit of a monopoly who think's it is it's god-given right to keep over 90% of the OS market. Of course, the government ought to protect that right, after all, a free market is communist and encourages terroism, doesn't it?

Ridiculous.

Tanenbaum: This is not a copy of my work.
Ken: No, you're misinformed. It is.
Tanenbaum: (In disbelief) Uh, excuse me?

Origins of television

[jifl]

I think you misspelt John Logie Baird although he was a little older.

" The man behind the demonstration was a 37-year-old Scotsman called John Logie Baird. And what he showed on screen, 19 months before Farnsworth, was far superior to Farnsworth's "blob of light", as it was famously described by Albert Abramson in The History of Television."

Next you'll be claiming that Edison invented the light bulb!

Carl Sagan

[mr_tenor]

Carl Sagan: "If you wish to make an apple pie from acratch, you must first invent the universe." (http://www.mediamasters.com/sagan.htm)

capitalists and workers

[Sivaram_Velauthapill]

It's kind of funny for a capitalist, like Ken Brown at AdTI to be claiming something in the name of workers. Ken Brown should just stick with the "investment community" and "corporations". Everything else is kind of meaningless coming from him.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that linux is or is not good for the workers. All I'm saying is that someone from an institution like AdTI shouldn't be commenting on things they don't support.

Linus Should Look for a Lawyer

[TRINITE]

IANAL, but the content of this response, particularly the character assassination parts and the allegations that Linus used ilegal proprietary code, ought to be grounds for a libel suit. What do the IAALs think? A good (and easy) verdict would maybe scare off future attacks such as these, or at least force such hacks to be a little bit more believable in thier approaches. This absurdity deserves to get an IBM-style legal clobbering.

Such hypocrisy... it's unbelieveable.

[YouHaveSnail]

I haven't yet seen anyone comment on AdTI's namesake. Alexis de Tocqueville was the 19th century French author of Democracy in America , an influential examination of American government, politics, and society. Highly educated, he deeply valued truth, knowledge, and freedom.

A hypocrite, according to Webster, is someone who "puts on a false appearance of virtue." Kenneth Brown, by naming his organization after Alexis de Tocqueville, does exactly that: he's trying to pass off his loathesome tripe as scholarly research. It's obvious to anyone who cares to look beneath the surface that AdTI is a sham, but it's still a crime against that which de Tocqueville loved that Brown insists on dragging the name Alexis de Tocqueville through the mud.

Ellsworth M. Toohey

[jbwiv]

I was never a fan of the Fountainhead until I started following this story about the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution et al. Quite honestly, I've never seen a clearer situation of life imitating art. The OS movement is definitely Roark-ish, and Ken Brown excudes the very essence of what Toohey represented.

Frankly, I'm sicked that folks like Brown really do exist. I'd much rather leave them in the Fiction section.

Lies lies lies

[hkb]

Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector. Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well.

Translation: This "leprosy" benefits consumers with lower prices and that's evil, because as corporations, we need all the money we can possibly rape from them.

Basically, Torvalds and other Linux advocates are admitting to using a 'three monkeys' policy for software development: see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.

Uh, what? Are you sure you're talking about Linux, who's source is publicly available for perusal? Or are you speaking of closed-source software? See no evil, indeed.

Specifically, Torvalds and the Linux kernel management team accept blind source code contributions.

What method are the Linux team supposed to use exactly, to determine if submitted source code was from closed-source proprietary software? I'm no Linux bigot, but by their argument, I could easily see a case against closed-source software.

The reality is that, noone, including Linus Torvalds, can ever guarantee that code in the Linux kernel is free of counter ownership, or attribution claims. AdTI suggests that the U.S. government should buy and invest in software from a confirmable entity, not from an assortment of unconfirmable sources.

FUD FUD FUD. What commercial vendor can ever guarantee that code in their products is free of counter ownership? How many lazy/tired/disgruntled commercial software developers have "borrowed" GPL'd software?

>AdTI is certain that inevitably, some unfortunate user of Linux will be facing an incalculable legal problem.

I am certain that AdTI are a bunch of twats. What Linux user will ever experience a real legal liability threat? Why would it be any different than any commercial software user?

Anyhow, I'm pissed I even bothered to give this fucking twat more than a second of my time.

Yet another worthless fucking troll that just pushes me closer and closer to growing a beard and playing little faggy tunes with a recorder for dragonflies.

Re: who is paying him to write this crap?

[SpaceLifeForm]

The GOP (Greedy Old Party) knows that MS has the US between a rock and a hard place. MS can't falter too quickly as it will place a big burden on the economy. So, the GOP has to continue to keep MS afloat until the economy can adjust (and the rich GOP dudes can cash out).

I'm not making this up!!!

[yttrium]

And the top quote, and this is a GEM! I am not making this up! Search and you'll find it yourself...

To write Samizdat, I worked with (and quoted) many individuals directly or indirectly familiar with Linux development. AdTI will continue to interview people within the open source profession about open source. It would be skewed and bias to only quote people that are anti-Linux or anti-open source. I have done this for years, and will continue to do so, regardless of what a source thinks of my theories. [Emphasis mine]

I hope people do read this shit.

[twitter]

Sure, Microsoft is behind it, but it's not working. They can google bomb to promote Brown all they want, but it's empty. The rest of the world is marching along and it has nothing to do with Brown's or Bill Gates fantasy FUD world. The divergence is so great, anyone can see it.

Is this the best M$ can buy, a rehash of ancient GPL FUD? It's pathetic. It's so bad, Al Gore would recognize it as bullshit. There are no clear definition of terms, most of the statements contradict reality and it's clear that Ken Brown is a ranting lunatic without any kind of "intellectual" backing. The bozo can't even clearly summarize his arguments.

IBM, HP and others are making billions of dollars on Linux, but Ken tells us that Linux will ruin the US IT industry and destroy the US government's "IP" holdings. Right... Any government leader worried about wasting taxpayer dollars has only to call IBM and quit buying the eXPensive software offered by the sponsors of Tocqueville.

While he never mentions it, the GPL is the real object of his attack. It's so tiresome to read the same nonsense again and again. Free software is adding tremendous value to the US and world economy. No practical person can have failed to notice this by now. Besides insults and and old dire predictions that have failed to come true, Ken also never mentions specific drawbacks of free software nor tells us how non free source code does anything any better. While all charges of code theft that have been leveled at Linux have proved unfounded, many commercial companies have admitted to stealing free code. The whole notion that people who openly publish their code are theives somehow trying to pull the wool over anyone's eyes is preposterous. We are supposed to trust people who hide their source code like a dirty secret instead?

Ken really had an impossible task, but it's one of his own making. All of his experts are calling his opinions for what they are. How can he do anything but shift around when confronted with it all? He tells us, " AdTI will continue to interview people within the open source profession about open source. ... I have done this for years, and will continue to do so, regardless of what a source thinks of my theories. " Ken, baby, why bother asking questions if you are not going to listen to the answers?

Oh yeah, namecalling. "Linux is a leprosy.", "sponging", "'three monkeys' policy", "boasting about stealing, reverse engineering, and illegal copying", "theft of the Lions notes", give me a break. At least he's consistent with the mud he wants to throw at just about everyone in computer science.

The only real theft going on right now is Microsoft's attempt to extort money from Linux users through it's SCO proxy. How does that fit into Ken's worldview?

Re:I hope people do read this shit.

[abreauj]

Don't forget that all this code is stolen from corporations like IBM. Billions of dollars of IP were stolen from IBM and given over to Linux. IBM stole that IP from itself and then gave it to Linux.

It's exactly like when my sister bought me a birthday gift at CompUSA, and then stole it from herself and handed it to me at my birthday party. She paid for it, so clearly it's her property, and since it's in my posession now, I'm holding stolen property. This makes me a thief and my sister an accessory to theft.

Re:I hope people do read this shit.

[minkwe]

Ken, baby, why bother asking questions if you are not going to listen to the answers?

Because my mind is made up. Don't confuse me with the facts

--ken

Re:I hope people do read this shit.

[Tony-A]

Is this the best M$ can buy?
Considering that you're looking at the Closed Source model in action against the Open Source model, I think the answer is YES. And it does reflect on Microsoft's competence and the competence of Microsoft's software.

What's interesting is that a lot of stuff coming out of the woodwork is from people who are most certainly NOT fans of Linux.

Value != Cost

[Anonymous Coward]

Value and cost are different economic concepts. Use of linux reduces the _cost_ of technology solutions, not their _value_ to the consumer. As an example, running linux on my computer rather than windows adds great value to it (in that it makes me more productive and happier) but at a decrease in cost (the amount of money I pay). If some PDA manufacturer switches to linux, the value of the product to the consumer stays the same- it is only the cost that decreases.
The idea that cost and value are the same- and that commoditization is detrimental- only makes sense if you view industry as a method for draining cash from consumers. If you look at the economy as a way of meeting the consumer's needs, commoditization is a huge boon.

Is it just me or....

[tyrione]

does this wreak of Bill Gates (self-proclaimed computer scientist/architect since the famed days when he made a name for charging to use his code versus his colleagues who gave it away) jealous of Linus Torvalds for being more technically sound, literate and a better professional keynote speaker?

I mean Bill always could whip out the programming card against Steve Jobs, but of course knew when to keep his manhood in his pants by comparison to Steve's charisma, wit, naturally engaging public speaking abilities, and generally excellent tastes in all things aesthetic. So now comes a man who can be coined the UberGeek for the programming world, that even women will think is cool and I don't think William's ego can handle it.

Paying third party propaganda publications to write about the credentials and origins of Linux all in an attempt instead of producing an innovative product to keep ahead of the curve sure sounds like it can only come from one Institution.

Who here has seen the early 1980's gang movie titled, "Warriors?" If not the entire premise is about one gang shooting the appointed voice of all the gangs and then blaming it on the Warriors, in hopes to later lay claim and control of all the gangs. Bill reminds me of that runt with the beer bottles connected to the ends of his fingers, hunched over saying, "Warriors... Come out and playyyyaaaay."

SCO reminds me of the Baseball Team that goes running around in their "official outfits" thumping on weaker gangs until it gets its own bats used against itself.

Linus gets to play the role of the Warrior that gets blamed for all that is wrong within the code of gangs.

The Federal Government is exactly like the citizens of New York during this movie, ABSENT.

the point.

[DragonTHC]

listen up fellow geeks.

you're getting hung up on the he said/she said.

Ken Brown is complaining about evolutions in the market. He is mad because linux is competition for other operating systems. He is whining like cartman because no one is profiting from linux as a whole. This, my friends is leading us towards a peer to peer society. Yes, the market is devaluing because there is a better product available cheaper or free in some instances. Naturally the market is in a worrying flux. Only, it's the competition who's worried. And rightly so. Linux is exponentially sucking their customer base away. Why use windows as an embedded os if there's something free available? surely it's not because you prefer windows's legendary stability. I also assume you don't want windows's powerful modularity. I don't believe it has to do with cost anymore. Especially not for embedded systems.

Ken Brown seems to be a literate idiot. everything he's written on the subject of *nix smells like bullshit to me. What if IT directors around the US learned the truth about windows?

Help put a stop to MS-FUD

At high noone...

[bw5353]

... under the gazing sun, there will be a terrible struggle between the two protagonists. People lock themselves up at home and dare not go out. A few minutes to twelve, a resolute man starts walking down the street in one direction. His name is Ken Brown. From the other direction comes his eternal nemesis: the spell-checker.

This shows again that BSD is part of the problem

[Nice2Cats]

Flame me into oblivion if you want to, but I think Brown's polemic shows again that BSD is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Writing code under the BSD license not only means that you are working for free for Microsoft and Co without getting anything in return; you are also creating something that they can use to beat real open source developers over the head with. When somebody like Brown comes out and praises you, you are doing something wrong. BSD is getting to be little more than a pet of the worst kind of software companies.

Richard Stallman is making more sense by the minute.

My take on this paper

[Slinky Saves the Wor]

Well, well. Yet another Microsoft-sponsored article with FUD!

First of all, the article is ignoring a simple fact: Linus did not write Linux as it is today in that couple of months. He only wrote the core of the kernel, and improved gradually upon that. The community was there helping in programming and sending in changes ever since he publicized Linux.

However, the Samizdat paper IS correct in the sense that the Open Source development model (called a "hybrid model" in the paper in order to dilute the idea) is inherently faster and better than any cathedral-like development models of the proprietary software industry. They base their argument around that, but twist it around like any good spin doctors.

Much of this questionable borrowing is a) not in the best interest U.S. corporations b) not in the best interest of IT workers in America c) at a serious expense to the investment community, an entity betting on the success of intellectual property in the marketplace.

Notice the a) and c). This is the crux of the issue and the reason why we see such Microsoft-sponsored FUD appear. The a) and c) do not give a rats ass about b), but they must mask their attempts to be such. The b) is a decoy. The real issue here is money. The real issue is about people who would rather get themselves rich than to see something which benefits all people.

And the argument about Linux developers not being legally accountable as their contributions are based on trust... As far as I know, there is an EULA in all Microsoft (and other proprietary) software, which reject any legal responsibility. So how does the Microsoft way of "software is provided as-is, with NO WARRANTY of any kind, express or implied" differ from similar Linux statement?

I think that the Open Source community should respond to all these allegations by making a site which outlines the war between Microsoft and free software. Starting from the depths of history, covering the SCO offensive, going through the black ops of crackers breaking into certain free software sites, examining the massive anti-Linux, anti-Open Source advertisement campaign by Microsoft, dissecting the various paid articles appearing in computer magazines worldwide and analyzing the AdTI research funded by Microsoft.

Make it factual, and don't offend with style when you can offend with substance.

Does this guy know anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency which contributes to the worldwide effort to protect and govern intellectual property.

Someone should inform Ken Brown that if you're going to be discussing open source code and its license scheme, the appropriate agency is the U.S. Copyright Office and not the USPTO. Anyone who doesn't understand that distinction doesn't understand IP law.

--Mike Perry, Inkling blog , Seattle

That would be hilarious

[Chris Acheson]

New internet passtime: ADTI trolling!

innovation?

[Anonymous Coward]

From Brown's response:

>However, building a product that starts with the
>accomplishment of others and announcing it as
>completely your own work product, is not invention,
>nor is it innovation. Innovation can only work
>properly if innovators properly credit the work of
>others, especially if the innovator has decided to
>introduce the product into the marketplace for
>commercial gain.

Has someone mentioned this to Microsoft... the 'innovators'...?

Stop laughing; this is serious

[violet16]

I'm genuinely concerned by Brown's article, but even more so by the community's response, which is to call Ken Brown an idiot and laugh the thing off. Even the Slashdot story begins: "Yes, I know it's getting boring by now..." as if every intelligent person can immediately see the gaping holes in Brown and AdTI's case.

The problem is that the community has almost entirely missed the thrust of AdTI's argument, and, worse, has failed to notice the danger it represents. The community has attacked the technical details of AdTI's argument while mostly ignoring the ideology. But Brown's new article clearly identifies AdTI's target--policymakers in the US Government--and these people will do the opposite: ignore the technical details and ponder the ideology. And to them, there will be an arresting argument here.

The key point AdTI makes is this: you can't trust OSS unless there's a big company or institution behind it. This is why Brown questions Linux's authorship; not to prove Linus is a fraud, but to muddy the waters sufficiently so that the answer is unclear. They are demonstrating not that Linus did not write Linux all by himself, but that we can't know for sure exactly who did.

And let's be clear: although Linux is the example, it's really the entire OSS movement in the sights here. AdTI wants to take software creation out of the hands of individuals and put it in the hands of corporations and institutions. It clearly draws an ideological line: software created by companies can be true open source, but software created by informal groups of individuals is "hybrid source," which means potentially stolen.

If the US government agrees, expect legislation that puts the onus on software creators to prove that their code is not stolen (in contrast to the current situation, in which the onus is on an infringed party to prove someone stole it). This would be a trifling matter for an organization with salaried employees, but onerous for groups of unconnected individuals. It could severely damage OSS projects that rely on code contributions from the general public, and make it much harder for new projects to ever get started.

Of course, when I say this is "what AdTI wants," I really mean that this is what the companies who fund AdTI want. They're talking about diverting billions of dollars, so the companies who stand to gain from this will make sure Ken Brown's words are heard in the right places in government. On the opposing side, however, we the community have very little money and influence. So our voice is at risk of going unheard in the places that matter.

The community needs to realize it can not laugh away Ken Brown. It must understand that the issue is not whether Linus wrote Linux, but whether any group of individuals should be allowed to come together, write code, and release it. That is one of the most vital issues we have ever faced.

VMS and WindowNT

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't WindowsNT (and its derivatives) just VMS gone bad? jeez, you only have to look at the initials and see where the similarity starts (thanks to HAL and IBM, of course and i'm clearly not the 1st to print this eg http://www.pottsoft.com/home/vms/vms.html ):

V -> W
M -> N
S -> T

it would be interesting to have some writings about WNT etc for historical comparison. and DOS?

D -> C
O -> P
S -> M

oh, darn....close.....

Who becomes richer ?

[Alain Williams]

1. The hybrid source model negatively impacts the intellectual property model for all software, and inevitably the entire IT economy. As long as the
2. value of the IT economy is dependent on the preservation of intellectual property, it is counterproductive for the U.S. government to invest in Linux.

This is the key to M$ concerns, it wants to maintain the benefits to the small number of companies in the IT sector. Open Source is about bringing benefits to everyone.

M$ wants to get richer by everyone giving it money to use it's software.
Open Source permits everyone to get richer by not having to give money to use software.

(OK - I know the other benefits of libre software, but that is for another day.)

Brown tips his hand early on in his reply

[sporktoast]

I realize that with 400+ comments that this has probably been said already, and perhaps even more cogently. But I thought I'd get my opinion down regardless. This is from Brown's response at ADTI

[...]
True Open Source vs. Hybrid Source
[...]
While hybrid software appears to be the same as open source, it isn't. Hybrid source code can never be true intellectual property. The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as private property, which makes the hybrid source model significantly different from true open source. Noone can ever truly accrue any value from owning hybrid source software, because everybody (and anybody) has the rights to every line of improvement in it. Worse, many argue that if hybrid source is used the wrong way, it can make other source code hybrid source as well.

Brown seems to consider that the value of software comes not from the utility it provides for the posessor, but from the posessor's ability to deprive others of that utility. He appears to believe that only scarce things have value.

his source of information...

[CAIMLAS]

Government investment in open source development will accelerate innovation. However, increased investment should be in true open source, open source without any stipulations, other than attribution and copyright notification, not hybrid source.

"Hybrid source code" is a phrase coined by former Tocqueville Chairman Gregory Fossedal. The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time.

Gee, I wonder where he gets his information. Obviously this is a verifiable source of unbiased journalistic excellence!

EPA / Tobacco issue is bad example...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the EPA was soundly thrashed in court
for violating scientific principles in their
handling of tobacco. The institute may be trash,
but not because of this issue.

Re:EPA / Tobacco issue is bad example...

[jcr]

I know what happens when I'm in the presence of tobacco smoke, and no AC is going to tell me that shit isn't dangerous.

-jcr

Ken Brown acknowledges...

[Col Bat Guano]

"The Microsoft team sold their Word editor, a complicated product with over 110,000 lines of code to the general communitiy. Without the editor, it is very likely that the AdTI project would not have succeeded. The Microsoft team only asked that the book be called Microsoft Word/Samizdat, a very simple request for helping to make him famous. But Ken Brown silently, but deliberately let the naming idea die."

Shame Ken Brown, shame!

Lions book WAS probably unavailable to Linus

[rmlane]

In the same time period Linus was writing early versions of Linux I certainly couldn't get a copy.

Furthermore in almost every interview with experienced computer science professionals, almost all said that they personally had a copy of the Lions notes, an illegal distribution of Unix source code. Even Tanenbaum admits to teaching from the Lions notes. Linus says he started with nothing. In a recent ZDNet interview(6), he denies having the Lions notes. This is also unbelievable to AdTI. The story is too amazing----everybody that I met knew Linus intimately enough to confirm he wrote the kernel from scratch--- had an illegal copy of the Lions notes---- but Torvalds, was never---even near the Lions notes.

Not having a copy of the Lions book is sure as hell not surprising to me. I was a CS student in 1990-1992 at Sydney University, which is about a quarter hour drive from UNSW, which is where Lions taught his course and published his book. I studied OS design, and wanted a copy, and could not obtain one. This is the exact same period that Linux was going from 0.01 in 1991 to 0.95c in 1992.

• The book was published in 1976
• The book was banned in 1978
• By 1990 / 1991 it had been out of print for 12 years and was really hard to obtain.
• Bandwidth outside the US was incredibly paltry, so downloading it would be very difficult. Australia (the entire country) had a single unreliable link of under 500 kbits in 1991, which was probably more than Finland.

Of course it is unserprising that all the people 10 - 15 years older than Linus who were licencees had copies: they were around when it was in print, or worked at AT&T / Bell, or knew people who did. I knew lecturers who had copies of the Lions book, but they sure wouldn't photocopy it for an undergrad (well, not me, anyway).

And as others have pointed out (including Linus), pre-1.0 versions of Linux were, well, crap. I tried it a couple of times in that period, and was less than impressed compared to the BSD derived UNIX systems we had access to at university, ignored it, and used pirate copies of 386 BSD.

Writing Linux (Freeix) 0.01 didn't require genius. Project managing 0.01 into 2.X did.

Re:Lions book WAS probably unavailable to Linus

[johnjaydk]

Have no one considered the fact that this book might have been the inspiration:

The Design of the Unix Operating System by Maurice J. Bach. 1 edition (May 27, 1986)

The book has the at&t "deathstar" logo on the title-page so it's not exactly a banned book.

RMS and IP

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... the GPL is ALL about IP. It has protections and safegaurds. It doesn't even have to be free! Contemp for IP? Not Linus, RMS maybe, but it's still a longshot.

Eh? You do know that RMS wrote the GPL (with Eben Moglen) don't you?

Re:RMS and IP

[Anonymous Coward]

He obviously doesn't. And the fact that he even brings up RMS in a discussion about "IP" is indicative of the fact that he is yet another Slashdot poster who hasnt read or understood a single thing RMS has said but feels he's qualified to perform a little rib digging.

For those who don't know, RMS is very clear about his opinions on patents, copyright and trademarks and they're all different. He even goes so far to have differing opinions on copyright depending on what type of copyrightable work is being discussed. Egads! RMS even distinguishes between different types of computer software. For example, he advocates the GPL for "generally useful" computer software but couldn't care less if computer games are GPLed or not.

To everyone: please read RMS writings or listen to him speak before regurgitating the FUD that is so pervasive on /. today.

Farnsworth is NOT the inventor of television

[GlowStars]

Philo Farnsworth invented the television at age 14.

Did he?

If my sources are correct, Philo Farnsworth conceived the world's first all-electronic television at the age of 15 (in 1930 or 1931).

However, the history of the invention of television goes back to Paul Nipkow (considered the father of "mechanical television", patented his "Elektrisches Teleskop" in 1884) and the works of D. von Mihály (Telehor), Vladimir K. Zworykin (Ikonoskop, 1923), August Karolus (who showcased a Telefunken prototype at the "5. Große Deutsche Funkausstellung" at Berlin in 1928) and many more.

That Telefunken prototype had a resolution of nearly 10000 pixel on a screen 8 by 10 cm wide.

Ken Brown doesn't know anything about code

[pmjordan]

I didn't read his entire "response", just about 10 or 20 paragraphs from various parts, but it is SO blatantly obvious that the guy has no idea about what he is talking.

(a) he obviously doesn't understand the extent of the UNIX/POSIX specifications.
(b) he clearly doesn't know anything about software engineering, getting source code, architecture, framework, interfaces, etc. all mixed up
(c) he hasn't even understood what his critics are saying. They are saying that Linus wrote the code but based it on the specs and architecture of previous Unices. The conclusion he jumps to is that he stole code.

It's really sad that this publication is going to be believed 100% by politicians, probably mostly because of the whole American Patriotism thing he's got going on in there. If you want the US government to believe you, you apparently only have to say that anything else is un-American. Bah.

Incorrect

[Drogo Knotwise]

Had he started with a blank hard drive, he'd have been ripping off the work of the computer manufacturers. No, for him to have written it from scratch, he'd have had to mine the metal he needed, pick up a few sticks with which to make a fire and weld it all together.

And even then he'd have to give credit to Ugh the Caveman.

Stop destroying our moneymachines

[Dodecha]

"Linux is a leprosy; and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector."
In other words: "WEE WANT OUR MONEY, and linux is destroying our evil capitalistic way of living!"

Linking business, link to Andy, not to Ken.

[JanMark]

Some reactions make a good point. If many people link to the Ken Brown site, Google will think it is important. The last thing we want is people googling for information to find that stuff first.

Please don't link to Ken Brown, and please do link to the Tanenbaum story (http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown).

Imagine a lawyer googling for information on some SCO/Linux case...

AmigaDOS was a master's thesis, wasn't it?

[msobkow]

IIRC, the original AmigaDOS was written by a master's student in Britain for their thesis in something like 6-9 months.

Granted it was a leaner, cleaner system than current Linux, but the same is true of most software -- one person with vision, a lot of coffee, and a suicidal bent for long hours at a monitor can create what seems an impossible amount of code.

Average coder stats are heavily biased by the 9-5 support and maintenance programmers. Hard core developers often write code 3-4 times as fast, sometimes more.

The only thing that is "impossible" is for some companies to accept that the "product" model of software is dying. IBM, HP, et. al. can afford this change because they already have huge consulting and hardware divisions. Others have focused their business careers on "product" and are ill-prepared for the pricing model shift.

Re:WHO CARES?

[chocobot]

well he's right. Don't feed the trolls!

More shocking news

[Sven Tuerpe]

In related news, AdTI announces more shocking research results. "After our discovery of the hybrid source nature of Linux we extended our research into other fields," an AdTI spokesperson said. He continued: "In the beginning we were just curious whether hybrid source concepts could be found in other fields as well. But soon we learned that the entire history of mankind would have taken a different turn, had hybrid source not been allowed to spread for so many years." While only excerpts of AdTI's upcoming book have been published yet, one can see the big picture already.

The shocking findings of AdTI include:

• Euclid of Alexandria did not invent geometry from scratch.
• Jesus Christ did not invent religion from scratch. Nor did Moses, Muhammad, or Buddha.
• Johannes Gutenberg did not invent books from scratch.
• Sir Isaac Newton did not invent from scratch the theory of gravitation, or the laws of motion. Newton even did admit his disrespect for intellectual property, pointing out: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
• The steam engine, one of the triggers and enablers of the industrial revolution, was not invented by James Watt from scratch.
• Albert Einstein received his Nobel Price for results he did not invent from scratch. Alfred Nobel, by the way, did not invent explosives from scratch.

Where would mankind stand today if there had been appropriate protection of intellectual assets throughout history? The AdTI spokesperson refused to comment on this question, emphasizing that AdTI is doing sound research, not writing science fiction. However, their results give "clear indication that hybrid source is linked to war, murder, and terrorism. For instance, Adolf Hitler impossibly could have invented mass murder and world war from scratch, and Osama bin Laden is not the inventor of terrorism."

Re:More shocking news

[Anonymous Coward]

My god! thanks ken brown!

Book from scratch?

[meldir]

When Linus "used" Minix and GCC, he used them as tools. Is this so hard for Mr. Brown to get through his skull? Apparently so.

And I suppose Ken Brown started writing his book in Word (and the publisher manually converted it to somethinh better); does that mean that he owes Microsoft something? It seems to be his implication...

One year of C?

[dallaylaen]

Linus was programming in assembly for several years when he entered the univercity. C is just plain easy for an .asm guy, more over it was designed for that!

Wanna facts? Google "Just for fun" (with qoutes).

Re:One year of C?

[upside]

Good one. A quote from an editorial review:

it all started in 1981 with his grandfather back in Finland, who let him play around on a Vic 20 computer. At 11 years old, Torvalds was hooked on computersespecially on figuring out how they ran and on improving their operating systems. For years, Torvalds did little but program, upgrading his hardware every couple of years, attending school in a desultory fashion and generally letting the outside world float by unnoticed, until he eventually wrote his own operating system, Linux. In a radical move, he began sharing the code with fellow OS enthusiasts over the burgeoning Internet in the early 1990s, allowing others to contribute to and improve it, while he oversaw the process.

For all Ken Brown is saying about what's wrong with Linus' story, I don't think he's even read the biography - or understood it if he has.

Re:One year of C?

[Pseudonym]

That's a very good point. He may have had only one year of C (which explains why his C programming style wasn't that good at the time), but he'd effectively had years of system programming experience, just not commercial experience.

Re:Noone? Good grief!

[Anonymous Coward]

Pronounced "noo-ney", rhymes with looney. It's Ken Brown's imaginary friend that "just KNOWS" all of these facts.

It's simple - pointy headed confusion

[dbIII]

One thing a lot of commentators miss about the free or open software movement (calm down RMS, get a dictionary) - is that it is really just the same sharing of information that has been used to give us the body of scientific knowlege we have today. E.g. In the short term having a second company with the knowlege to produce telephones may have hurt the first company, but in the long run the sharing of knowlege helped everyone - despite being anti-capitalist behavior it dramaticly helped the capitalist system.

People that wish to share information instead of hoarding it to weave some trivial one-off basket are depicted as communists, of putting knowlege before objects; i.e. putting Descarte before the horse, which everyone knows will just lead to us all driving about in devils chariots on roads that allow commoners despite the wealthy paying for the majority of them.

This guy is just another pointy haired barbarian in a suit - talking about theft comes easily to such types since the mindset is to take and not to produce. His writings say a lot more about him than the subject matter.

Now you've done it

[lysium]

I can guarantee you we'll make sure it gets to him. >:)

He is going to count that comment as eight death threats from open-source zealots, you know. It will also be referenced in his next publication.

Ken admitted it..

[Anonymous Coward]

At least Ken comes out and admits that the book is only a wooden club for the political arena. If he didn't slander Linux it'd be unusable for their sponsors. You have to appreciate it for what it is. Heck, try reading the US news about the iraq invasion.

Ken Brown seems to intentionally ignore all comments about the UNIX standards. I mean, the standards are public and that every OS that implements them is more-or-less UNIX compatible. Without the standards making anything compatible would require reverse-engineering (which is legal too).

The idea seems to be supporting software patents. That's why Ken goes so far to claim Linux is just an UNIX-ripoff and that it couldn't be possible without stealing UNIX IP.

OT: I sent an e-mail too..

[E_elven]

It looked like this:

Subject: Linux
Text:

Heh.

Shallow end Deep end Mr. Brown
I I I
I I I
V V V
oooo\
\
oooooooooo\ O
\ I
\oooooooooooo

Sure, it may not be the most constructive criticism he receives, but at least it's got pretty pictures on it. I'm sure he can enjoy visual art just like a normally developed individual.

His article was quite amusing in the way it tried to twist the words of the 'contributors', but fortunately it's sadly apparent even to a non-initiated person.

Time for the Gandhi quote

[b-lou]

• "First they ignore you.
• 
  Then they laugh at you.
  Then they fight you.
  Then you win."

While none of us Linux/OSS fans will appreciate Brown's book, it certainly seems to fit Gandhi's brilliant observation.

Winning can't be too far off.

It starts out bad... and then gets worse

[maximilln]

AdTI did not publish Samizdat with the expectation that rabidly pro-Linux developers would embrace it
Name-calling "rabid"
Its purpose is to provide U.S. leadership with a researched presentation on attribution and intellectual property problems with the hybrid source code model
The worst fears are confirmed. This is an assassination attempt on F/OSS using the political vector
The actual purpose of hybrid source is to nullify its value as private property
(ignore the provocative "open source" vs. "hybrid source" labels for a moment) Here comes trouble...
The hybrid source model negatively impacts the intellectual property model for all software, and inevitably the entire IT economy. As long as the value of the IT economy is dependent on the preservation of intellectual property, it is counterproductive for the U.S. government to invest in Linux.
Complete and utter FUD!!!

The "hybrid source" label is being used to invoke a psychological response in the politicians who are not familiar with the computing industry. "Hybrid" is a term that gives them headaches--hybrid cars, hybrid crops, hybrid tissues, hybrid vaccines, hybrid banks, hybrid businesses.

AdTI's hybrid source, as near as I can tell, is F/OSS as in GNU. Their open source is F/OSS as in BSD. I personally feel that they've mixed things up. Freedom, I feel, naturally strives to preserve freedom as in GNUs GPL stipulation that GNU GPL code can only be included with GNU GPL code. I feel that freedom is naturally at odds with greed. Freedom, according to AdTI, preserves the freedom to be greedy. This only ensures that, politically and legally, the upper levels of corporate America will always have a stranglehold on the wage slaves and Universities who are really writing good code.

F/OSS software is only a threat to MS because the selling price of $0.00 is forcing the upper levels of corporate America to turn the blistering eye of Quality Control on proprietary software. This is not something that proprietary software has ever experienced. Previously they have always been able to hide behind EULAs, smoke, mirrors, and play on the ignorance of the customer. The outlandish price of proprietary software has been justified by a witty saying (which proves nothing),"You get what you pay for." This is not to say that F/OSS inherently has no value. This is our last-ditch effort in a war that began 15 years ago--the infuriation, indignation, and humiliation of watching MS and their alliances live luxuriously on a good marketing pitch while many superior programmers, and their products, were left to watch a light bulb swing from the ceiling.

GNU GPL seeks to allow real free-market capitalism to set the price of software. The industry, and AdTI, is quite happy with the current model which allows them the freedom to pilfer code from any available sources, fund the marketing, and charge outrageous prices for poorly hacked together crap. I don't agree that all software under GNU GPL would be free because, if people weren't being raked over the hot coals for crap software, there would be enough fair-minded people who would have the available resources to contribute back to the projects that they use.

I dunno, maybe not. It's possible that an IT admin in a large corporate setting would have trouble convincing the executive board that yearly donations should be sent to F/OSS projects. The default setting is "No" and, unless the executive is a computer programmer, making a donation to a F/OSS project is perceived as little better than giving money to a beggar on the street. The upper echelon of corporate America has a beautiful corporate pyramid scheme running as long as they continue to side with proprietary software vendors. Company money is dumped into proprietary software, and MS, Norton, McAfee, etc. stock has a good return every year. Selling F/OSS as a cost-cutting measure isn't really the Right Thing (tm) to do because it doesn't

Hands up those who believe Linus really did it

[thehunger]

Because that's really the core issue, isn't it?

Feasability. Ok, so we know Tanenbaum has no beef with Linux and a lot of people stand up for him. My question is whether that implies that you believe?

Who believes a 21-year old who had no OS development experience and 1 year of C programming, could create 30.000 lines of OS code in one year (including kernel code) without basing his stuff on other code or books?

Am I getting this right?
I mean I am happy to believe it (although when I had a few years programming experience and then followed a Minix / OS development course, I was lightyears away from being able to write one from scratch). I just want to check if YOU really believe this.

Dennis Ritchie is not a Unix Celebrity

[beforewisdom]

Dennis Ritchie is not a Unix Celebrity.

He is a Unix *GOD*.

Please get this straight for the future

Can we really afford to laugh?

[beforewisdom]

Can we really afford to laugh?

Look how far SCO got and SCO is not out of the game.

Given this, it is apparent that the business world doesn't read slashdot or even groklaw.

Maybe the goverment will not either.

I think this book will definately fool some people who will matter.

Steve

Oh the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever tried to learn something about the accomplishments of AdTI? Well, unfortunately, http://www.adti.net/pubsaccomps1.html gives a 404 Not Found....

What Are They Tocque-ing?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about we collect all this information debunking the adti "research" in one concise, politician-ready document and forward copies to our elected representatives in a pre-emptive move, so that they are made aware of the questionable (to say the least) nature of the adti book before they even receive their copy!

I suggest this title:
"What Are They Tocque-ing at the Tocqueville Institution?"

It's a title that will stick in their minds and associate the Tocqueville name with ridicule.

What

[xyote]

You have no idea what constitutes a patentable idea. And the number finite states for a computer greatly exceeds your capacity to imagine them. There are good reasons to not have software patents or to restrict them or otherwise curb patent abuse. You're not helping the cause with this kind of reasoning.

Scary

[VirtualAdept]

This is a very scary rebuttal we now have from Kenneth Brown. As you go through, notice that Brown doesn't actually come out and say that Linus stole Minix code line-for-line. Instead his main argument seems to be that Linus stole the concepts of Minix and used them in his Linux.

Think for a minute about what Brown is really saying. I'm willing to presume that all the concepts used in minix are concepts that any third year computer science student would pick up from an Operating System Fundamentals course. I have an OS Fundamentals textbook sitting on by bookcase, from when I took that course.

Brown's argument seems to be that we can't draw on concepts from other pieces of code or from books. Its illeagal in his world, or immoral.

Think about what that means. Taken to the extreme, that means that any time you go to write code you cannot use a reference book. You cannot use any precompiled tools. Heck, I'm not even sure if you can develop using any sort of API in Brown-World. Every time, you have to start from complete scratch. Otherwise, you're irreversibly tainted from those sources.

I don't know about the rest of you, but this is not a world I want to live in.

Re:Scary

[maximilln]

Brown's argument seems to be that we can't draw on concepts from other pieces of code or from books. Its illeagal in his world, or immoral.

In the scientific industry every employee agreement that I've signed since graduating college contains language which allows for the same type of ownership. Every concept, technique, method, or piece of knowledge that I pick up while employed with company XYZ, according to strict interpretation of the employee agreement, is still property of XYZ. If the attorneys from my employer six years ago get bored they could try to say that anything I do with my current employer is property of my first employer.

Happily no former employer has asked for me to send back brain tissue.

Mozart didn't write any of that music either

[ricksmith]

We all know, of course, that Mozart was much too young and unsophisticated to write any of that music attributed to him. Wasn't it all really stolen from someone else?

Just kidding.

Even the most trivial of Mozart's familiar works shows more creativity and genius than any derivitive Unix-like kernel. Reimplementing the kernel is NOT rocket science. It takes some taste, sophistication, skill, and LOTS of time on your hands, but it doesn't require some exceptional degree of genius (well, it needs that 99% perspiration part). That's why there are at least a half-dozen Unix kernel clones out there right now.

Rick.

Alexis de Vile-Torque is VA Linux Front!

[Zeinfeld]

It all fits. Desperate to fill pages Cmdr Taco dispatches hack to Belgium to create bogus Linus smear story that can be relied upon to fill pages for months.

The sad fact about this story is that in the political arena it often works. Remember all those smear stories about John McCain being 'angry', those were planted by Karl Rove. Rove is currently trying the same scheme using a GOP operative from the Nixon era to smear Kerry, claiming to have 'served on the same boat' as Kerry, which he did, but long after Kerry and his crew had been reassigned. Even so said operative is considered an 'expert' on Kerry's leadership by the Wall Street Journal editorial pages and other far right hack rags (Faux News, Washington Times).

Brown is right in one respect. A teenager could not have written Linux by himself in a few months. But that is not what anyone who knows the history of Linux says happened. Several hundred people made substantial contributions to Linux over a period of ten years.

The Linux that Linus uploaded to an FTP site bears very little relationship to modern Linux. About all that could be said for it was that it booted (sorta) and it ran for a while (sorta). It is not at all surprising that Linus could produce a program that could serve as the starting point for a collaborative effort.

Even if Ken Brown was right and all Linus had done was to create a bootable version of MINIX that does not make him a plagarist. The MINIX legacy has always been acknowledged but MINIX was a program printed in a book and would have stayed that way if a Linus had not come along.

UNIX is not a particularly complex operating system. Compared to the kernels of MULTICS or VMS, UNIX is a simple hack job, originally written on some very klunky hardware by a couple of guys in a skunkworks project. The idea that this could be duplicated a few decades later by a student using modern programming tools is not at all surprising.

One interesting question though is whether Linus would have been as motivated to produce a better O/S if the MSDOS/Windows of the day had supported features like true multi-tasking etc. For instance if OS/2 had been released in viable form...

Re:Alexis de Vile-Torque is VA Linux Front!

[maximilln]

One interesting question though is whether Linus would have been as motivated to produce a better O/S if the MSDOS/Windows of the day had supported features like true multi-tasking etc. For instance if OS/2 had been released in viable form...

I saw OS/2 running at the same time that I saw some of my college buddies running unofficial alpha releases of Win95 (Chicago?). Windows seemed to be more responsive and OS/2 seemed to be more stable. MS responded to the stability issue by responding to consumers and pushing (slashing) the release date to six months earlier than initially expected. OS/2 was stable, but everyone was buying Win95 because it was on every market shelf.

No matter which opposing OS you choose (even if they could've put the AmigaOS on x86 at the time) MS had the resources to make a better marketing and sales campaign.

Linus writing Linux was woven into the fabric of history by the fates. There's no way around it.

Re:Alexis de Vile-Torque is VA Linux Front!

[Tony-A]

Linus writing Linux was woven into the fabric of history by the fates.

Me, I don't believe in magic or fates or whatever, BUT.
Methinks that's the only effective way to describe it.

Time, circumstances, whatever. You grab a tiger by the tail and hang on for the ride.

It will be very interesting to see how all this plays out. Microsoft is in a panic because they're fixin to be writ out of the script. Whether to allow XPSP2 on pirated machines? That the question is worthy of debate is enough to ensure that Microsoft will continue to be plagued by worms and viruses.

From scratch

[Anonymous Coward]

Pointless argument about what "from scratch" means. Did Linus have knowledge of other os kernel implementations and the theory behind them? Of course yes. Now twist this to mean he did not create the Linux kernel "from scratch". Go figure.

Kenneth Brown didn't write Samizdat!

[Psionicist]

Let's write a book about whether or not Ken Brown actually wrote this book all by himself. Come on, no single person can be this stupid.

at least give NOFX due credit

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw that whole missing village idiot thing on NOFX's site a year or so ago.

Someone please tell Brown...

[jtheory]

that "noone" is not a word? He uses it repeatedly, so it's clearly not a typo.

Perhaps he and I can meet at Ye Olde Sandwyche Shoppe at noone to discuss this, as well as his interesting discussion of "hybrid source".

I like it how open source is dangerous because we have to have some degree of "trust" that developers aren't adding in other people's IP. Whereas private corporations developing closed source applications, with a financial incentive to steal others' IP and no easy way to get caught will be struck down by God if they do it, so we don't need to depend on "trust".

Nice.

More analogy problems

[Lindril]

"Linux is a leprosy"

I thought Linux was a cancer? Apparently the medicinal sciences are still in their infancy.

Thanks for the Disinfopedia link

[mhackarbie]

Hey, that site kicks A!! Thanks for mentioning it.

mhack

Who is Brown's father exactly?

[slmdmd]

Brown very well understands linux's origin and also knows that it is not a copy but he job is to quote exactly opposite, as he is getting big time money from M$ and fame.

Who is this Brown anyway?
May be we can fund an investigative journalist to write about Brown's origin to findout who is his father exactly?
The principal of his kinder garden school has different story(read facts) to tell.

Comparing Windows and Linux?

[thrills33ker]

Let's review the facts: 1. Linux was written by Linux Torvalds. 2. Linux has a lower TCO than Windows on the same hardware. 3. Windows causes billions of dollars in lost productivity every year due to viruses, instability and willful lack of interoperability. 4. Linux will inevitably destroy Microsoft's parasitic monopoly grip on the IT industry. 5. Despite this, the best Microsoft can come up with to defend itself is baseless lawsuits, quotes taken out of context by known shills, and FUD that was discredited years ago. Make up your own mind, folks...

Re: Nope --- MOD PARENT UP!!

[some guy I know]

I would call Linux (as an OS) a variant of GNU, much as SunOS is a variant of BSD.

Not the same thing.
The code in the SunOS was based on the code in BSD.
The code in Linux was not based on anything in the GNU project.

BTW, Stallman isn't "insisting" that a distribution including GNU and Linux code be named "Gnu/Linux", he is merely asking that it be named so.
While I think that his time would be better spent on other, more important things, I do think that his view on the subject is frequently mischaracterized.

He does indeed mention the GPL, by omission.

[Bob_Robertson]

While he never mentions it, the GPL is the real object of his attack.

Examine his argument that "hybrid software" is not really "open source". He clearly states that "open source" is only the BSD or MIT licenses.

I also enjoyed the "hybrid source software can infect other software by some uses". Well, DUH!!!! The use, which he doesn't specify, is from directly using the source code.

Yeah, it's so obviously the old "Microsoft says GPL bad, BSD good" argument that it's pathetic.

To understand the importance of the GPL, everyone who doesn't know Microsoft continually copies from BSD, raise your hands. Nobody? Good. Lesson learned.

Bob-

Linus at 21 couldn't possibly write a kernel

[dmh20002]

and Einstein at 26 couldn't possibly have formulated special relativity (not to mention do the work that got him the Noble Prize for the photoelectric effect)

Lyon's book?

[mpecatam]

From Brown's email message to Dennis Ritchie:

"How did you react to the Lyon's Book and its subsequent recall?"

"Have you ever discussed the Minix/Linux migration or any other topic with Professor Tannenbaum in Finland?"

He doesn't seem to have the slightest idea about what he is talking about. Who is him to contradict the opinion of all the experts in UNIX?

I think Microsoft's involvement in this will backfire on them, nobody can trust a company that funds this kind of journalism.

Re: Operating Systems vs. Kernels

[wintermute42]

I now see that the comments on operating system authorship vs. kernel authorship are on target. In responding to my email Ken Brown seems to admit that Linus wrote the Linux kernel.

Perhaps I need to go back an review my books on operating systems. Perhaps I am the one in error here. But to me an operating system is as I have described it in my reply to Ken Browns reply to my initial email. This is included below.

Again, all this may simply be a waste of time. Ken Brown seems to have latched on to a position that most in the computer science and engineering community feel is silly. He seems unlikely to admit he is wrong. My comparision of Ken Brown to Peter Duesberg is probably appropriate.

Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2004 14:19:45 -0700
To: kenbrown@adti.net
Subject: Re: Linux, Linus and so on...

Dear Ken:

Perhaps the problem is that, my view, Microsoft has perverted the meaning of operating system. What Microsoft calls an "operating system" comes with a vast array of applications. In my view the operating system called Windows NT is the software system described in "Inside Windows NT" by Helen Custer and David N. Cutler, 1992.

As far as I am concerned, an operating system is software that:

1. Manages access to devices like disk, graphic displays, the keyboard and, in modern systems, the network interface, sound and high performance graphic devices.

2. Manages memory. Modern operating systems provide virtual memory, that gives each application the illusion that it is running in its own address space.

3. Manages processes (applications). An operating system provides support for switching process execution when a process accesses a physical device and when its allocated time slice expires.

4. File system. The file system exists above the device management software.

5. Network protocol stack. The network protocol stack, like the file system, exists above the software that provides abstract access to the network interface hardware.

In theory some of these components, like the protocol stack and the file system, could be application level, not operating system level. However, in practice they are built into the operating system for performance reasons. And in the case of the file system, there is usually integration with the virtual memory subsystem.

If you open a text book on operating systems, an "operating system" is what I have described above. The Minix book is one example. On Slashdot people have cautioned me to refer to this as a "kernel". I guess that I'm from "the old school". To me what I have listed above is an operating system. "Kernel" does not have as exact a definition in my understanding. For example, one view of an operating system kernel might be that it does not include the file system and the network stack.

The window system, user shells, file system utilities, compilers, text or graphic editors are not part of the operating system.

To return to the original point: whether you want to call it an operating system or a "kernel" there is no question in my mind that Linus Torvalds wrote Linux. As I noted, this operating system has evolved. Compared to the current operating system, the initial operating system was relatively simple. It was well within what a dedicated, talented software engineer could implement. As I've noted, most UNIX software engineers will agree with my view.

As Linus Torvalds would be the first to acknowledge, he is a small part of the Linux community. He has managed the integration and release of the components that I have listed above as "operating system" (or, if you must, "kernel"). The fact that he has been willing to be inclusive in this process has sometimes been listed as the re

amazing...

[sad_]

there are two things that we can conclude here.

1. this guy must be jalous or something at linus because the only reason he says linus stole code is because he can not believe it is possible to write a working kernel in one year, wtf, you know, all those researchers are wrong, smoking is good for you, i don't believe them, read all about it in my book i'll be releasing soon. *doh*

2. he is using the arguments of BSD against the GPL. he calls BSD true open source and the GPL is bad bad open source. why? because quote: 'building a product that starts with the accomplishment of others and announcing it as completely your own work product, is not invention, nor is it innovation. Innovation can only work properly if innovators properly credit the work of others, especially if the innovator has decided to introduce the product into the marketplace for commercial gain'. hello, reality check! that is exactly BSD.

is this guy stupied or stupied or both? he doesn't even understand the difference between the two licenses.

Cannot argue like that

[SerpentMage]

I buy your argument, but you cannot argue with Mr Brown like that. The problem is that Mr Brown believes in strong IP protection. Strong IP protection means that an individual has a unique thought that nobody else had. And if there is another person who does the "same" thing faster, or more lines, then that other person copied. After all another person could not be faster, or smarter, or more efficient.

The reason why people like him argue that way is because globalization is having this ugly boomerrang effect. Companies like globalization because it allows them to export. The problem is that as markets open other places can produce goods cheaper, better and more efficient. This means those companies that fought for globalization are saying; "Oh wait, this is not working like I wanted it to. I know how we will stop this, lets call it IP and protect the sh*t out of it".

Software was not "supposed" to be adopted as quick as it has in other countries. You see other countries should produce our cheap radio's and TV's. BUT they should never have been smart enough to be able to code software or do "intelligent" things. Ok I am being cynical!

Propaganda and Samizdat

[klausner]

Brown must be a disciple of Joseph Goebbels' "Big Lie" principle. And calling his column Samizadt is an insult to those who used the underground press to topple the USSR. Quite a combination.

Egyptian pyramids determined to be illegal copies

[mulp]

Adti has examined the pyramids in Egypt and has not found anyone in Egypt, or in fact anywhere in the world that can provide a clear explanation of how a society without power tools and machinery could build the pyramids.

Further study has shown an uncanny parallel between those pyramids in Egypt and various modern structures whose designs and construction techniques are clearly documented. These pyramids all required the used of computers and the best power tools and machinery modern society has to offer.

To quote adti's Brown, "Clearly these copies in Eygpt are illegal copies of these modern builder, obviously produced by time traveling extraterrestrials. While many people dismiss our conconclusions, we have talked extensively to many people who have been abducted by aliens or have seen so called UFOs."

Brown continues, "Yes, many have argued that the reports have more mundane explanations, but we will not limit our reports to those who insist that scientific methods provide no support for our conclusions. But to dismiss extraterrestrials would seriously limit the opportunity for profit to just the Earth."

Thread on alt.os.development

[solicit]

It seems they're also going to hobby OS developers as part of their "research". Probably trying to find out if it is credible that someone could build an operating system by themselves, or something.
The name Justin Orndorff also appears in the ESR response.

James Burke's "Connections" (OT)

[Crazy Eight]

That was a great show. Beyond the educational value it shows off the British knack for expressing abstract ideas in common sense language. Burke deserves some serious credit for precience too. I recall seeing one installment in the early-mid 80's where he advocated the need for continued expansion of modern communications technology -- open interconnectedness -- to offset our modern capacity for apocalypse. Ever the optimist, he ends the episode saying, "We can do it with this" as the camera zooms in on his raised index finger and comes to rest on a microchip.

P.S. I just google'd for DVDs of the show and found out it was made in '78! Check out this description of the final episode (it's probably the one I had in mind when I started to post): "...there is a look ahead to the need for radical change in the availability and use of information in the future..."

'inventor' is not necessarily the right word.

[Crazy Eight]

This reminds me of that LKML discussion about whether or not Linux is "designed". IIRC, Linus firmly proposed that it isn't -- that he takes aim in a certain direction, but the actual result is much more like a product of evolution than the fleshing out of a predetermined structure or goal.

Re:What a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

M2 unfair applied to an Offtopic on parent. Thank you for alerting me to this abuse of moderation.

Re:What a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto for 'Troll.'