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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."
Comparing the MINIX kernel to the Linux kernel is like comparing a microkernel to a monolithic one...Hey wait a minute!
""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?
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".
Here is a bit of speculation. One guess and two don't count.
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
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.
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??
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
You may also be interested in the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution's Disinfopedia page
Microsoft
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).
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
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.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
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.
Really? Who? I've never heard that one before.
Philo T. Farnsworth
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.
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.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
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.
... 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.
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!
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.
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:
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.
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.