Slashdot Mirror
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."
GNU maintains HURD, which has oh so many users.
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?
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?
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.
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 ? /.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"
More the name gets discussed among the geek squad (a.k.a.
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.
__________
The more I know people, the more I love animals
"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.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
... 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]
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
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.
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".
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 ?
This is a vocabulary issue. He's obviously not saying he's not the author of Linux, as Brown wants us to extrapolate.
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.
theefer
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?
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.
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!
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.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
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.
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.
Holy CRAP! These people are TOBACCO industry shills, too?
Ok, that's all I needed to know.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
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..
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
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.
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.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Hey, maybe the USPO could have a moderation/meta-moderation system like /.
/. do a day, and how many patents show up a day? I really don't know the volume, but why not a moderation system?
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
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,
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 :)
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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?
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
(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
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.
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.
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...)
Complex truth: "Linus created Linux."
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
"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"?
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?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Richard Stallman is making more sense by the minute.
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.
I do not moderate.
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.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
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.
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.
TCAP-Abort
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.
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.
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.
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...
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/