Tanenbaum Rebuts Ken Brown

Stephan Schulz writes "Andrew Tanenbaum has rebutted Ken Brown's reply to his original comments on the (in)famous AdTI report on Linux's origin. It's quite entertaining, and leaves little doubt (well, even less than before) that Brown is conciously twisting the truth. Choice excerpt: 'I'm pretty animated all the time. But I only get tense when people try to put words in my mouth. After half an hour of repeatedly answering the question "Could Linus have written the Linux kernel by himself?" in the affirmative, I was getting a bit irritated. ... People who know me would probably confirm that I do not suffer fools gladly.' I'd add that being called 'the good Professor' repeatedly would have me exploding in no time..."

Comments

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[MrBlackBand]

And even if open source weren't in the best interest of U.S. corporations, where is it written that all activities everywhere in the world must be done with the interests of U.S. corporations as their primary goal?

It has been like this for most of the 20th centry and all of the 21st (so far). If you are a brutal dictator you're okay in the eyes of the U.S. government (you may have even been installed by the CIA) as long as you allow private corporations to do business in your country. If you are a socialist or even *gasp!* communist government you are evil, even if you are not a dictatorship.

After some head-scratching, an honest inquiry

[ScottKin]

I think people are missing some very important items here:

1) There is a high degree of probability that Linus Torvalds *did* write the original Linux kernel on his own.

2) Since so many people contributed to the Linux Kernel over the past years, it is *possible* that some code from proprietary sources made it into the Linux kernel.

3) Whether any proprietay code is currently included in the present Linux kernel is still under speculation. SCO *did* show several snipets of code that *were* proprietary and *were* part of the 2.4 codebase; hence, it *is* possible that other proprietary code is still within the current 2.6.x codebase.

What I'd like to know is this: what kind of code review goes into the process of submitting code to the Linux Kernel? Is there actually a group of people who check the code for possible violations of the inclusion of proprietary code into the kernel, thereby invalidating the GPL/LGPL or whatever Open Source licensing the Linux Kernel falls under? I'm aware that there are people who check the submitted code for other tendencies, but it would be interesting to see if there is anyone who watches for the inclusion of proprietary code into the Linux kernel before it actually gets included. In other words: does code checking include the legal requirements under the licensing model that Linux uses?

--ScottKin