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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..."
Critique of Ken Brown's response
For an even funnier laugh, I recommend reading this one Is Brown Really the Father of Samizdat? - A Parody by Justin Moore to counter the Fake Research, hmm did I mention about their Fake Research?
As long as KB keeps Tanenbaum responding, he is getting free publicity. Contraversy is frequently used to obtain free press, and boost sales.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
Introduction
For those of you just tuning into this soap opera, here is a brief summary of the plot so far. Ken Brown, president of a Washington think tank called the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution has written a book claiming open source using GPL is a bad idea and that Linus Torvalds stole Linux from MINIX, which I wrote. Linus, the alleged stealer, responded. As the alleged stealee I also felt the need to respond. Now Ken Brown has reacted to my responses. I very much doubt that when he came to visit me, he was expecting me to (1) defend Linus in our interview and then (2) do it fairly publicly later.
I was planning to spend my Sunday afternoon doing something useful, but since Brown has directly challenged me in his posting cited above, I feel I should respond. I will do this in the form of commenting on his posting. His comments are set off typographically like this:
I have to give credit where credit is due. Brown got that one completely right.
***EVERY*** country has a patent office. The United States is not unique in this respect. Furthermore, many people think that patenting software is a terrible idea. The subject of software patents is a very controversial issue in Europe right now.
I can live with this. Professors are always on the lookout for new sources of research funding.
Excuse me? A Finnish student writes some software (in Finland) that a lot of people like and he is accused on sponging off U.S. corporations? And last time I checked, quite a few U.S. Corporations, such as IBM, seemed quite happy with Linux. And a very large number of U.S. corporations seem to be using the (open source) Apache web server. 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?
This statement is not grammatically, politically, or factually correct. Does he mean "Linus has Hansen's disease"? I hope not. But if he does, fortunately, it is highly treatable these days. If he means Linux is wasting away, the facts speak otherwise. If he means "Linux is very contagious" this is true, but a better wording could have been chosen.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
Who's the greater fool, KB with his million dollars in book revenue
It's being published through a vanity press, not a real publisher.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
Not true - as mentioned elswhere here and on Groklaw, it's being published by a "vanity" press, which means no huge advances, royalties, or anything. He'll be lucky to break even on the publishing costs.
C|N>K
Every year at the University of Waterloo the Computer Engineering and Computer Science students personally build their own operating systems (including documentation) in less than four months. This is done without any prior knowledge of how OSes work and without being taught C.
I'm sure many universities and colleges around the world do the same. Perhaps Ken Brown should investigate them as well.
http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~ece354/
http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs452/
I dunno....
MS is having serious image problems at the moment.
Their own customer surveys show 'Dislike of MS' to be a top negative factor.
Somewhere in one of the latest halloween memos.
Not a single entity that goes about business with self-confidence---
Big, hairy dude, arrogant in the extreme, and unresponsive to complaints.
On the contrary---the squabbling, temperamental, individuals often strike up passable relationships with entrepnurial minded business people....
Even if there is a fair bit of petty squabling, there is a healthy, competitive open source community, and a GREAT deal more hands on/friendly service out there.
MS sales people do not tend to be as well received as they used to.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Actually, I seem to remember that Linus's wife is some kind of Finnish martial arts champion. :)
that's what it is.
and people might be interested in knowing that there is also a third party critique of the rebuttal to the rebuttal posted over at k5 with a pretty mature comment tree of its own.
lysergically yours
Many of the recent Slashdot comments regarding the ADTI President Ken Brown's defense of his controversial tome noted that his principle audience was not the Linux community, or even the IT industry. His target audience is the policy-makers in Washington D.C. How is that group informed about issues surrounding open source in general and the Linux kernel specifically? One 'trade' publication, FCW Media Group, "produces information resources that help government IT buyers... form an integrated information system to help them purchase, build and manage technology in government." They are 'our' target audience in defending the concept of software libre, in advancing open protocols and other standards, and in correcting FUD. The May 3rd online issue provides one such opportunity to advance Linux in government research.
Nothing stops the flow of FUD like well-positioned information.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Well here's a mirror
Not more than you need, just more than you want
...is that his own consultant says he's full of it.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
I know novelists who can write a 400-pager - from plot idea to submission to their publisher - in under six months. That's with the pages edited, spell checked, and proofread. If you know the goal and have the tools, it's NOT A BIG DEAL!
That's exactly what many US undergrad OS courses are.
My undergraduate compiler class had only one homework assignment: write a compiler by the end of the semester. That gave us four months time. We got the grammar for an Algol-like language to be compiled, which was relatively standard and simple (but it did have runtime allocation of arrays, IIRC). And the work was spaced out over the course of the semester -- first we did the lexer, then the parser, then the code generator. But that was basically it, you got four months, go write the compiler or flunk, chump. (We had to write it in C.)
Not an easy assignment by any stretch, but we all got it done. I was an undergrad junior at the time, and there were juniors, seniors and grad students in the class as well. Don't ask me about the sleepless nights during the last week before the due date, I still remember it all too well.
Writing an OS is even harder than writing a compiler by an order of magnitude, and getting that done within a year may very well be too much for your average undergrad. But it's not the kind of thing that a young programmer couldn't possibly do if he's talented, hard-working and has a little experience. Ken Brown's suggestion that it just can't possibly be, which is a weak argument in any case, has no force at all.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
As it happens, there is another POSIX-ish kernel that was written by a student in about a year. That's the Thix operating system.
(I played with it once and it wasn't very impressive, but from my casual examination, it seemed at least as advanced as Linux 0.01.)
The fishs translation (which is pretty hillarious in itself) can be found here.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I hope ESR didn't mean to say that Linus lifted actual code from Minix. But it is absolutely true that Linus used Minux as a "scaffolding".
Linux is now self-hosting: you can use a Linux system to edit Linux sources and compile them. Before Linux was self-hosting, Linus used a Minix host. I don't think the original 0.1 kernel was self-hosting yet.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Anonymous Coward suggests:
;-)
This sounds like something I'd like to see Perens' "Open Source Risk Management" take on.
I'd rather see Daniel Egger's Open Source Risk Management take such issues on. If Perens had his own OSRM, that would confuse things. He'd potentially confuse himself, since he already accepted a position on the Board of Directors for Egger's OSRM.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
I have wrote a 14,000 line application in less than three months.
:)
So what?
I can write a Java program that can produce 14,000 lines of useless but valid C code in about 5 minutes.
The quantity of code shouldn't be the question, which is Tanenbaum's point. What could the kernel do at 0.1? Well, not much.
So is it belieable that Linux wrote it all by himself? Sure it is. The LOC argument is pretty stupid, isn't it?
----- rL
Since I don't have mod points, I'll respond. GIVE THIS GUY SOME KARMA!
/everything/, from the bootloader to init, without being able to test much of any of it until all of the pieces were built and tested, Linus most likely /did/ use sections of code from minix to fill in the pieces he hadn't written yet. Once he got the piece he was working on to work, he moved on to replace the next piece in the chain until version 0.01 had no traces of minix in it, simply because everything in v0.01 was a full re-write.
Rather than having to come up with
What you say matches up with my recollection, although I don't remember anything about the books being blank.
He decided to just watch the government, and kind of scale it down to size, and run his life that way. --Laurie Anderson
We can conspire about why he's so driven to his (repeatedly refuted) belief that Linus couldn't have written Linux without ripping someone else's code off all day, but the fact remains that KB's own consultants have contradicted him!
I used to be a TA for CS452 Real-Time Programming course at the University of Waterloo. The assignments for that course came in two parts: (1) design and implement your own real-time multitasking kernel, and (2) use it to design and implement a real-time control system for either a robot arm or a model train.
The students had about a month and a half to complete the first part, which was broken into four assignments. The kernels had a microkernel architecture, but I don't think that really alters the development time that much. (The message passing was highly synchronous, which helps to limit the mind-boggling complexity of debugging a distributed program, which Dr. Tanenbaum doesn't seem to discuss.)
They worked in teams of two, but when I took the course, my lab partner conked out on me, so I ended writing the kernel myself, but that was okay since I had written multitasking kernels twice before, one in MACHINE LANGUAGE (no, not that wimpy symbolic-assembler stuff!) for a Commodore-128.
So, it's quite do-able for a motivated student to write a relatively simple kernel in the amount of time that Linus took. Just ask the CS452 students--they had to build their kernels in just six weeks, plus they had other courses and limited resources in the lab.
University of Chicago, where I went for my CS degree, had a class where you wrote an Operating System as a project. In talking with my peers at work, many other colleges had a similar class, where students also wrote an OS. I am not sure what is so theoretically hard about doing this, especially when Linus turned this into a group project, and invited other interested people to assist. If college students can build a basic system in a quarter or semester of college, I suspect that the more dedicated types could whip out a really nice example in 6-12 months.
Greg
there was a low-profile scandal about 15 or 20 years ago in the US when a political special interest lobbying group paid off a congressman by working a deal where he "wrote a book" that was then "published".
In 1989, Speaker of the House Jim Wright was forced to resign over a shady book deal. I seem to recall that it was a real book, but that unions bought thousands upon thousands as a way to funnel illegal donations to him. If I recall correctly, after consulting Google, the book was his Reflections of Public Man, which had been published in 1984. He's continued to write since then and is a regular newspaper columnist.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
From what I can see, it isn't a vanity press (who charge you up-front for the privelege of publishing your book), but they certainly don't seem to be reputable. They do say some things that aren't true in their marketing material, like:
If I publish with BookSurge, can I still sell my book to a 'traditional publisher' or enter it into contests?
You still control all the rights to your book. You may effortlessly transition into a traditional publishing deal. We will only need 30 days to remove your files from our system.
One of the rights that a 'traditional publisher' is likely to be highly interested in is the right to be the first to publish your book. Which you'd no longer be able to give them...
The Standard Bookseller Discount.
40% discount. Pre-paid, non-returnable.
uh-huh? Standard bookseller terms is, I believe 50%. 30 days credit. Sale-or-return.
(emphasis added)
Well, you can say that again...
AdTI here demanding $60,000 from lawyers of Philip Morris to start a media campaign.
Six times national Karate champion in Finland to be exact.
A Reminder... (Score:1)
by ScottKin (34718) on Tuesday June 08, @05:29PM (#9370763)
(http://users.adelphia.net/~scottkin/)
To remind everyone:
Linus Torvalds is EMPLOYED by OSDN, who also happens to own Slashdot.
Never trust everything you read. OSDN & Slashdot have a vested interest in "defending" Torvalds, as well as defending Linux - regardless of whether Torvalds *created* Linux on his own or he copied and/or transliterated code from other sources.
The word that comes to my mind is "nepotism".
--ScottKin
You sure proved that poor thinking does not inhibit the abilty to type.
Your Brown's kind of reader facts be damned.
Linus works for OSDL - Open Source Development Labs
Slashdot is a part of OSDN - Open Source Development Network
No connection between the two, other than Linux enthusiasts have an interest in but, but no direct business connection.
In your mind aparently the difference of one letter or one word makes no difference,
well then I'm sure you'll understand this Tuck oft cupid".
Quite the contrary -- besides the whole feud with Linus, even earlier he quarreled with Stallman. It seems that Andrew, being at a Dutch institution called (in English) "Free University", had created a compiler kit called "The Free University Compiler Toolkit", and Stallman was intrigued and assumed that Tannenbaum was a kindred spirit and suggested a collaboration (this was in the 1980's, when the GNU project was first taking form). Tannenbaum in no uncertain terms told Stallman that "the university is free, but certainly not my software", and tried to dissuade Stallman from continuing his quixotic quest to create GNU.
Anyway, the point isn't to criticize Andrew, but to show that his current support is all the more useful because he's *not* a traditional fan of free software.
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?
Perhaps you'd like to explain how anyone - whether from a big closed-source corporation or part of an open-source collection of coders - is supposed to check code to see if it came from another closed-source product? Whether you're Microsoft or Linus, all you have to go on is the word of the programmer who submitted the code. Linus and others obviously review any code that is submitted (as has been demonstrated recently with attempts to put in backdoors), but like any company, they can't check code against sources they don't have. And in either case, the punishment if such a thing were to happen would come down on the person who knowingly violated copyright.. the programmer who submitted the code.
The only difference between Microsoft and Linus in this situation is that Linus allows anyone to see the code, and check for themselves whether their copyrights are being violated. How would anyone ever know for certain if their code was included into a Microsoft product? Microsoft has provably used code from outside sources before.. even open-source sources.
Schandenfreude
This is funnier than most non-German-speakers realize: The term "Schaden" means "damage". So "Schadenfreude" is "joy of seeing someone damaged".
"Schande", however, means "shame". So "Schandenfreude" is the "joy of seeing someone shamed".
This post brought to you by the letter 'N'.