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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..."
So I guess this is the rebuttal to the rebuttal of the first rebuttal.. :-) Well done Andrew Tanenbaum!
I believe that's what you call a discussion. This is just the type where they don't look each other in the eye and talk indirectly to each other.
Others have made this point, but it's true: there's plenty worse than this to come. There are very powerful forces that are threatened by the development of Linux, and they will fight to the death. Hired character assassins are just the beginning.
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- G.K. Chesterton
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.
Its always been interesting that when somebody (or a group of people) don't want to hear a certain answer, it often goes in one ear and out the other just in time for another "listener" to ask the same basic question phrased slightly differently in hopes of obtaining a reply closer to the desired view. It seems that many times the media in general has this practice almost molded into an art.
http://www.adti.net/samizdat/open.contradictions.h tml references an ESR quote from Cathedral.
Of course - i'm not sure they're aware that Minix isn't exactly Solaris-level UNIX that Linux is approaching rapidly...
Where the idea that the go-cart of Linux 0.1 - which borrowed the ideas of 4 wheels, axles, steering wheel and brakes from Ford cars - is the same thing as stealing Fords from the lot remains to be still explained by AdTI.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Why doesn't KB just cut his losses and slink away before he's made a greater fool of, if that's possible.
/. all day, confident in their superiority.
Are you kidding? He's trying to sell a book, it's 100% in his best interest to stay in the spotlight as long as possible no matter what that takes. Who's the greater fool, KB with his million dollars in book revenue or the people who laugh at him on
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security
If you think what I think you mean, I sort of agree with you.
Linus and Ken ought to be screening their public responses to this mess through their lawyers.
I can bet you any money (and lots of it) that those funding this AdTI "research", have lots of money for their lawyers.
This is such an obvious hatchet job, I have to wonder if it isn't a draw for something, more
Lets hope the plot doesn't thicken.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Because there is a world outside of slashdot. Yes, everyone here is going to snicker and roll their eyes about how this guy is obviously an idiot since he questions linus, the gpl, linux, etc., but there are people in the rest of the world who actually will consider what he has to say. Maybe he doesn't care if the crowd here thinks he's a fool? Maybe that's not who he is writing for?
I'd rather be lucky than good.
I think it's about time everyone got together and created one polished and solid response to Ken Brown's lies and insinuations. We've heard from Andrew Tanenbaum, ESR, RMS, Linus, etc., but what I would like to see is a formal and official response to the AdTI book that is being published, tearing up its insinuations point-for-point, in a way that his own target audience (i.e. "decision makers") couldn't ignore. Particularly, I think it needs to be made clear that even his *own* research on how Minix influenced Linux code showed no code "theft".
The people that KB is targetting just aren't going to "stay tuned" for the latest back and forth between KB and OSS advocate X. They need to have all the evidence presented to them clearly and concisely, and I think it needs to be from all the major players in the OSS community. I think this will *strongly* discourage people like KB from spouting lies and deception, as they know they will be called on it, at the expense of any journalistic integrity they may have had. And the more obvious it becomes that this is (likely solicited) FUD, the more the whole exercise will backfire on those that hoped to benefit from it.
Agree 100% with him there. For some reason US corporations take it for granted that all countries/entities everywhere exist merely to pander to their interests. To this end, they are fucking not only with the citizens of the US, but with people everywhere.
The Patent on Basmati rice (a US corporation obtained a patent on Basmati Rice, which's been grown in India for thousands of years), and even the war on Iraq (the Halliburton/Cheney/Iraq_Reconstruction_contract connection) are just a couple of examples of what they're up to.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Has anyone else noticed how eloquent and concise Tanenbaum's responses have been? I have many of the books he has written from when I was in school (and I enjoyed them all), but here he seems to take on an amazing writing persona. It's good to see him in top shape. Not to mention that he's so funny. There should be a book written about all of this.
He'll be lucky to break even on the publishing costs.
Especially since he intends to distribute most of the copies for free for the purposes of political lobbying.
KFG
Because, unfortunately, the Suits in Redmond (and elsewhere) have been quite successful in implying/suggesting/insinuating that the likes of Andrew Tanenbaum are nothing more than dirty hippies (and RMS has not been much to help to dispel this view) who don't believe in IP, Ken Brown will keep on looking like an expert to be listened to, and the various PHBs will continue to buy his crap. So, keep on wishing, but the truth is, the more noise people make about Ken Brown, the more believable his bullshit become to Suits and PHBs.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Don't people think he was hired (i.e. paid) to do this political lobbying?
Ken Brown is being paid to put the FUD scare on Washington policy makers in the hope of slowing down Linux/Open Source.... nice try but too late. Every industrial nation and under developed country of the world is already putting Linux to work, cutting costs and getting more from less hardware. All one has to say to Washington is "You don't want to use Linux? Fine. Oh, by the way, the Chinese are building supercomputers that compete with ours, and they're not running Windows. What's that? You say we need more supercomputers for the NSA to fight terrorism? You don't have the budget for countless proprietary software licenses? hmmmm... what to do... what to do... too bad we can't use Linux. The Indians are using Linux everywhere and loving it. Boy we sure could use some Linux here..."
-
Are you kidding? He's trying to sell a book, it's 100% in his best interest to stay in the spotlight as long as possible no matter what that takes. Who's the greater fool, KB with his million dollars in book revenue or the people who laugh at him on
/. all day, confident in their superiority.
Personally I think KB may turn out to be the bigger fool in the end. 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! Frankly I would suspect continuing to go to print with such a claim (even though it's his opinions, accusing someone of theft when your own research (e.g. consultants repots) have told you your opinion is wrong will probably not pass freedom of speech muster. KB may find himself on the wrong (and losing) end of a libel suit once his book is published. I doubt he'll have much left from his proceeds even after the legal battle's over, whomever wins.Yes I could be wrong, but there is so much out there already refuting, disproving, contradicting everything that we know KB's got in his book so far that I just can't see HOW it couldn't be considered anything but libel when it goes to print at this point. I also hope Linus follows up on it, I'm sure there are plenty of folks willing to help support a Linus vs. KB libel suit out there.
If KB's really doing this because MS is paying him and/or his institute to do it, I sure hope he got a good price for completely and utterly destroying himself.
I am not fully aware of Brown's expertise in the subject of OS history and computer science in general, but do you think that Tanenbaum might have an edge in that department?
From what I read Brown has a B.A in English Literature... WOW, this is so not impressive. Andrew has been a larger part of the CS community and probably has a better idea where the 'any key' is than Kenny does. I find the self-righteous B.A. types to be just that. You will never win an argument with them because they will never be able to ascertain when it is over. I think Andrew deserves a lot of credit for even writing a rebuttal to Ken's comments.
Ken Brown is serving a personal agenda by writing for the right, and to bolster his own personal exposure with those who he wants to work with/for. Doing some research, Brown's first Open Source article came in June of 2002. 2 years vs a life time... I think the term is 'on crack' when someone thinks they are correct over someone with a lifetime of exposure on the subject.
Andrew Tanenbaum has been there done that, and probably has more knowledge of what is going on than most people out there. I read a lot of ASTs textbooks, and still have them on my shelf. I think its pretty easy to side with him on this one.
I don't think for a second that he even came close to making the case that LINUX is stolen MINUX code. However, Brown's larger point is scary. Given SCO's suite this could be a big hairy monster hanging over opensource for quite some time.
We in the Open Source community need to face up to the possibility that some of us may be cheating and contributing code that we don't have a legal right to contribute.
Complain about how Microsoft gets away with stealing code. Complain about SCO having a business plan based on lawsuits. But, we need to think about this: We (the open source community) may be getting off light. There may be a time when someone contributes something that they did not have a right to, when it will be obvious, and when it will be all over the NYT.
Opensource needs to get an answer to this fast!
I just read Ken Brown's reply, and one thing struck me quite forcefully: Mr. Brown's grammar is terrible! His writing is full of comma splices ("it wasn't a solo effort, it was a team"), tense inconsistencies ("for years, Linus is credited with being an inventor"), non-words such as "noone," and other obvious grammatical errors such as in "what is anybody suppose to believe?" and "it would be skewed and bias to only quote people that are anti-Linux or anti-open source."
I have a difficult time taking anything this man says seriously, quite apart from the actual content of his words, when they are delivered so poorly. This is especially troubling given that he is the president of the Alexis de Toqueville Institute! That such an uneducated man could rise to such a position in that organization does not speak well of the organization as a whole.
Mike
Microsoft has the patience and communication skills to write in a style and medium that government policymakers listen to and respond to.
The vast majority of open source advocates have no interest in this boring yet important work.
IMHO, This sounds like something I'd like to see Perens' " Open Source Risk Management" take on.
One of the lessons from this is to record the interview yourself. It can put the interviewer on the defensive. If the interviewer turns out to be a schmuck and twists your words, then you pull out the recording and throw it back in his/her face.
"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.
Would this be like taking a free TCP/IP stack and mixing it into a proprietary OS?
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
Ken Brown says that it's hard to believe Linus could write ~10000 lines of code in a year at the age of 21.
Hell, *I* wrote 40000 SLOCs, (source lines of code, as counted by a program line counter program, not just the number of newlines... which would be more) in ONE SUMMER -- less than three months -- when I was 18. My boss was astonished, and wrote me a great letter of recommendation. Part of what was going on was it was my first job, and I didn't really realize that it was OK if I wasn't coding 100% of the time... I worked like a demon, just non-stop, never taking a break, it was ridiculous. I have to laugh about that now.
I sure as hell couldn't do that now -- don't hav the motivation.
I would say that the age of 21 or thereabouts is about the ONLY age one could be expected to churn out that much code. That's just the age when smart programming people churn out code like crazy. Once you're older, the novelty of programming has worn off, and output is naturally going to drop, you just can't sustain that kind of energy and enthusiasm for the duration of your whole career.
To bad his consultant didn't demand a clause in their contract requiring his results to be included, unedited, in an appendix of KB's book.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Who's the greater fool, KB with his million dollars in book revenue or the people who laugh at him on /. all day, confident in their superiority.
So, your hypothesis is that the ends justify the means - particularly when money is at stake? A grifter in a suit and tie is still a grifter - regardless of his social standing.
The sad thing about all of this is that really brilliant people had to take the time to formulate rebuttals to the work of this second rate hack, who's only purpose in life is to serve as the mouthpiece of special interests.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
Is an agency which is internationally respected by everyone who is unfamiliar with it.
Sure, they may be a corrupt, underfunded failure with a tendency in many tech areas to work more against their intended purpose (to promote growth in the useful arts and sciences) than toward it, but most people don't know that because the general media seems very unwilling to report on this.
To most people "The United States Patent and Trademark Office" is nothing more or less than a very distinugished sounding name with several capital letters in it, which makes them automatically respected.
From the ADTI link:
``The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency''
Ugh! I nearly choked on that! Everyone I know laments the bad decissions taken by the USPTO (provided they have enough knowledge about it). It is not respected by many in the US, let alone internationally, with so many people opposed to US imperialism.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Schandenfreude.
Say you're writing an MP3 decoder. You don't start from scratch -- there's no reason to. You start by copying the source files from the open ISO reference implementation into your project. That's the "scaffolding" that ESR's referring to. You then go through the project and rewrite individual functions, and finally entire modules, to conform to your needs: smaller code, faster code, platform-specific optimizations, removal of legal encumbrances.
That's a very common procedure in the coding business when starting a new project. It's very likely that Linus did start by copying the minix/src/*.c tree, and it's also very likely that his first public release didn't contain a single line of Minix code.
Torvalds story because the comparisons were too unbelievable. For us to accept Tanenbaum'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."
Huh? I learned more in high school from a single computer science teacher than I did in four years of college. Some of my college CSCI professors were the biggest idiots I ever encountered, and easily 5-10 years behind-the-times. I often corrected test questions.
I am beginning to believe that most of these mean-spirited, burned-out baby boomers blew away a lot of their youth getting wasted or something, and resent anyone who pursued more productive ends. While it might not seem common, young people can be incredibly bright and productive. Linus' accomplishments at that age are actually not atypical IMO, among young people who have decent priorities and focus.
I was programming for a Fortune 500 company when I was 13 years old. Before I got out of high school I wrote the billing system for a major public utility. Hell, I once got a contract to write a book on C programming for the web and at the time, I actually had about a month's worth of C programming, and none of it was web-related. I ended up taking a "crash course" in programming and writing that portion of the book within a few months and it still holds up today. When I was younger, I did a lot of computer consulting and I'd often accept teaching/consulting gigs on subjects I was unfamiliar with, but I'd bone up the night before and pull it off with nobody being the wiser. 10,000+ lines of code in a year? Try 10,000 lines of code in a few days.
It really bothers me when people who don't have faith in their own abilities suggest others, such as Linus, are incapable of operating beyond the boundaries of their own mundane self-expectations.
I was shocked to see that Linux 0.1 was only around 10,000 lines of code. Could one programmer write that! You bet they could. I have wrote a 14,000 line application in less than three months. Linux could have easily written the kernel in a year. So what if he was only 21? That just means that he is right out of or close to being out of school and hopfuly full of the latest and greatest ideas. I hate to say this because I hate RMS's GNU/LINUX rants but the truth is Linus wrote the kernel he did not have to write all the untilities or the compiler. Those came from the GNU project.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Ken brown is a troll and should be ignored forthrightly.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"... 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'm afraid to said that Ken Brown is completely right here. I have been lobying for years to ban the use of light bulbs. Light bulb technology and any other electrical light producing devices have been reducing the value of candles for years now. Not just candles have been affected. Because of the low price of "electric" lighting other products are losing value because light bulbs are being used in their manufacturing plants.
There are deleterious effects on the whole US economy. Products have a lot less value and are available at a very lower price. Costly power lines have been built wasting precious money from the tax payers.
Please help me stop the light bulbs and all other kinds of electric lighting.
With all respect to Dr. Tanenbaum, it's not hard to look good when responding to someone as stupid as Ken Brown.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Ignoring the off-topic political overtones of the parent for a moment, do all US corporations expect the world to pander to them? Seems like a bit of a generality to me. In fact, I can only think of one instance where it was argued that the role of the various US "intellectual property" guardians (ie, copyright) is to enable large corporations.
Yes, our old friends at SCO. Recall when they tried the whole "The GPL is illegal because US copyright laws protect the profit motivation" argument, and got laughed at? And now we have Ken Brown saying that OSS is bad because it will kill the software sector?
*I don my tin-foil hat...*
It's looking more and more likely that Microsoft could be behind this crap, pulling the puppet strings. The arguments are the same. Linux is legally insecure, no company vouches for linux, linux is bad for the software sector, linux is stolen from Unix, linux will rot your brane!. MS is definitely funding SCO, and the AdTI has been verrrry touchy about where their $$$ comes from. I would wager at least even money that MS is behind it.
I know it sounds like the same slashdot ravings, but it's looking more and more like all this could be the voice of MS at work. So my ultimate point is don't assume that this point of view is anything but FUD until further notice.
Torvald's early kernels were very small and not extensive (and not too stable either). From the beginning, he's invited (publicly) the hacker community to contribute. The kernel grew and it became an open source project from the beginning. The organic growth of the kernel came from lots of people and was MANAGED by one person. Alot of the ground work had already been done by MINIX so, as a "novice programmer," Linus didn't have to re-invent the wheel-he used the structure of MINIX as a template and hacked it from there.
It's like a composer using the sonata form--the notes are different but the form is the form.
To extend the metaphor, the form has actually grown from simple tune to a full symphonic work as the motif began to grow and other musicians' contributed with different textures, sounds, and rhythms.
Aaron Copland's "Apalachian Spring" features an old "Shaker" tune called "The Gift To Be Simple." Copland didn't write the tune, but he did adapt the work into a larger polyphonic structure with variations and formal development. (It was a ballet score for a small ensemble then a full symphonic suite).
I suggest that Linus took Minix and did the same. Only Linus's symphony contains a bit of jazz improv by the use of extemporaneous solos from the contributing musicians in his orchestra under the baton of the conductor/composer.
I fail to see why Ken Brown feels a need to call out Linus as some sort of phoney. Maybe he can write about how Copland ripped off all those poor backward hillbillies in the Apalachians.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
1. Linux 0.1 == Linux 2.6
... inevitably the entire IT economy". (See 4 too).
2. Minix is a "Prentice Hall Product".
3. "Hybrid Source".
4. Software being cheaper is bad for the economy.
5. Proprietary software is immune to the problem of software attribution.
6. Rhetoric constitutes an argument.
1. This fallacy is used in the inference that since Coherent took several man years, Linux must have been stolen.
2. As even Brown admits, Prentice Hall released Minix under a libre license.
3. Perhaps "Noone can ever truly accrue any value from owning hybrid source software", but so what? Everyone can accrue value from such software. It is a rank non-sequitur to claim that "The hybrid source model negatively impacts
"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."
This guy has never written a line of code in his life, and it's painfully obvious. I cannot think of a single program that I have written where I have never used a book. Linus just typed in every line of Linux version 0.1 himself. That's what "from scratch" means.
Posters recognized by their sig,
"KB may find himself on the wrong (and losing) end of a libel suit once his book is published. I doubt he'll have much left from his proceeds even after the legal battle's over, whomever wins."
Good! Let him publish it and let Linus and the entire open source community (coders & fans) behind him sue the guy into oblivion. If enough pressure is applied, he will squeal about receiving funding and "advice" from Microsoft in the settlement proceedings. Then that testimony can be used in a complaint against Microsoft for not living up to the Antitrust Settlement.
Squeezing this imbletard (IMHO) would be much easier than relying upon squeezing SCO, the Canopy Group, and then finally Daryl and his brother Daryl into testifying or submitting statements about their little relationship with Redmond.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
American courts tend to lean toward freedom of speech and the first amemenment right. I would say sueing for libel is a much more British thing to do. Thier libel laws are far more entertaining. Just ask Oscar Wilde.
Also if Ken Brown continues to publicly assert that Torvalds stole ideas and/or code, and it can be proven that he did not. That is libel.
li-bel
n.
1.
1. A false publication, as in writing, print, signs, or pictures, that damages a person's reputation.
2. The act of presenting such material to the public.
Prof. Tanenbaum did not narrow the view. This 'report' very specifically says Linus could not have written Linux on his own with out taking code he had no right to.
Its very different then your examples of look-alikes. There's nothing wrong with that, as long as you wrote it entirely yourself, or with sources you have a legal right to. If KB were to use The GIMP as his example, he wouldn't be saying The GIMP looks lot like Photoshop, he'd be saying that the developers of The GIMP must have broken into Adobe's offices and stolen the Photoshop code, its the only way they could have a viable product.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Probably something of both. I suspect the project was probably pitched to him in terms of whatever principles he normally espoused. I doubt he was particularly knowledgable beforehand; while he may have had nagging doubts, it likely didn't seem too implausible.
So he takes the money, does the interviews, and somewhere along the way begins to realize how evil a thing he's really been asked to do.
At that point, he's already got the money, his reputation, and personal pride riding on this. Not to mention an aching conscience.
Of cousre it would be presumptuous to claim to know what really went on in his head; this is a guess. Regardless, someone in that position can either:
Once someone starts down that second road, turning back only becomes more costly. One lie begets another, and the whole vicious cycle begins again, each revolution effecting a further disconnect from reality.
It's like the moral equivalent of credit card debt.
That's how we end up with suicidal cult leaders, the Iraqi Information Minister, and Darl McBride.
Whatever you do, don't laugh, because in small or large ways it happens to all of us. Keep your conscience clean. If there's something you need to make right in your life, do it today, before the long-term costs catch up with you.
DNA just wants to be free...
Did you read the original Ken Brown article? The government may give a damn if they are running their servers on stolen intellectual property (I don't think they are, but I'm saying if they were, they would care). The government also cares if it is giving funding to a project that celebrates IP theft, when it could be funding another project that doesn't (he advocates government funding of BSD-style projects instead of gpl projects, but never actually explains why he thinks the BSD license makes a project less prone to having pilfered proprietary code checked into it than the GPL does). Corporations care if they are considering deploy linux. They don't want to be told "this is some code we found floating around the internet. We're going to deploy on 50,000 of our desktops." They want to know what is and where it came from, and whether it is safe to use from a legal point of view.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
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.
Which is what I've been saying since this crap came out. Ken Brown might be surprised to learn that many, many students have written compilers as class projects, too. (Having done both, frankly, the compiler was harder.)
The really amazing thing is just how many free (both as in beer and as in speech) operating systems there are out there. Last time I checked, there were dozens and dozens in an operational state, some of which are a hell of a lot better than Linux 0.01 was, many of which are maintained by one or two people alone, and a few of which are actually written in hand-coded assembly language, which is a damn sight harder to do than cranking out C. More than a couple of them have been featured on Slashdot.
Yes, writing a full-featured, mature UNIX-like operating system is hard. The reason Linux is one such OS is not because Linus Torvalds cranked out a buggy, minimalistic stub of an operating system all these years ago. Any halfway decent programmer with spare time and motivation can do that. It's because thousands and thousands of talented programmers took that buggy, minimalistic stub and have been cheerfully adding to it for a decade.
You can grow a garden in horseshit, Mr. Brown, but that doesn't mean you pulled the garden straight out of the horse's ass. Your book, on the other hand...
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
We should be considering the facts of the case, not the facts about the people debating the case.
But the main "fact" supporting Brown's case is merely his personal opinion that Linux would've been too much work for Linus possibly to have done on his own.
Since his argument is based only on intuition and not fact, the intelligence/education/experience of the parties are acceptable points of consideration.
Pointing out that he's just an English BA and not a Computer Science PhD is a completely valid attack on his authority to judge if a computer program is within a certain person's capacity.
Brown has no ability as a computer programmer- thus how can he claim to measure that skill in others?
Doesn't the quote "the U.S. government is one of the largest patent holders in the world, owning the rights to 20-30,000 patents" (from Ken Brown's reply) pretty much underscore the commitment to top-notch research at the Alexis de Toqueville institute?
"Hey, Bob! How many patents do you think the US government holds? 20,000 or so?"
"Ummm, yeah.. maybe 30,000"
"Ok, yeah, 20 - 30,000. That ought to cover us."
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
Seems to me Linus has a pretty good libel case against him regardless, should he choose to sue. Malicious disregard for the truth about an individual can have consequences.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
One thing that sort of pisses me off about Slashdot is that if you take time to read everything, and form a response - it's so far down that it probably doesn't get read.
I read - completely - Brown's webpage. Purple text gives you a headache. I then read Ta bu shi da yu's response on kuro5shin.
Andrew tannenbaum sums it up when he comments on his webpage about Brown's visit. Here was a guy (Brown) who clearly didn't understand patents, or how to sumbit patent applications or release them into the public domain. He didn't understand tenets of intellectual property law. His paper is full of deliberate misuse of terms . tannenbaum says he wasn't very sharp, and he was being nice.
The guy, Brown, comes to visit him and Tannenbaum asks him outright who funds this "thinktank". He dodges the question. Andrew asks - OUTRIGHT - is it Microsoft? Of course, he knows it is. The guy won't answer. Brown then starts down a series of questions that shows he hasn't done ANY research into the history of UNIX. None! He doesn't know about the AT&T vs. BSD lawsuit? To the lawyers out there, this is tantamount to going before the Supreme Court to argue a racial discrimination suit and not knowing what Brown vs. Board of Education was about. It's that stupid.
It's clear that Andrew quickly sizes this guy up as a moron, and tries to educate him. Brown will have none of it, diverting the questioning into a series of leading questions.
It's pretty sickening. Andrew Tannenbaum is a super bright man. His book, "Computer networks, Fourth Edition." is the BIBLE for network professionals. It is to networking what Kernigan and Richie's book is to C programming. Actually, that's not right. K&R is a primer, nothing more. AT's book is the definitive history of how we got to where we are.
It genuinely sickens me when little turds like Brown get a few bucks from some Microsoft frontman, and then set off on a smear job like this. What it says, ultimately, is that Microsoft is afraid. I chalked that up to Slashdot hype and wishful thinking, but stuff like this makes me re-think that position. MySQL and PostgresSQL are beginning to really cut not into Oracle, but into SQLServer. Sun has been bought off, but IBM is coming hard with Linux and clustering. The Dell's and HPs out there are putting together bigger deals doing Linux. It's pissing Microsoft off, where before I honestly believed they didn't care. They ignored it.
I guess we should all be happy that guys like Tannenbaum exist, and that they choose teaching and University as their vocation. They are the counter-balance to the mass of hysterical bullshit. They will live to document this era correctly for the next few generations. Sorry to be so melodramatic, but it's basically true. In 100 years, whatever happens, people need to know how it went down. It didn't matter when crooks like Jack Tramiel decide to bust out companies for their personal fortunes and change the face of personal computing (sorry, still bitter over the Amiga all these years later). But the stakes are 1000x larger now.
He is a real liability to anyone he tries to "help". Remember him claiming it was "one of us" who DDOS'ed SCO. He is a mediocre programmer and a mid-level flamer who sadly was annointed by the press as some kind of spokeperson for the free software community.
It's time he just shut up.
There are banner ads on the rebuttals, actually. They both get publicity.
When I see the words "think tank," I replace them with "paid mouthpieces." This properly indicates the purpose of these groups.
Near as I can tell, there are few real "think tanks" left in the US, unless you mean, "Stick these people in a tank until they think of a way to sell our bullshit as chocolate pudding."
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Had Philip Morris taken AdTI up on their offer, we'd have seen something similar back then to what we're seeing today: an apparently disinterested think tank raising a public policy issue for debate, while silently taking payoffs from a beneficiary of the debate.
In other words, it's not a smoking gun, but it's a gun case and a couple of empty shells, to the effect that AdTI can be bought for astroturfing.
What's really compelling, I think, is that a tobacco company apparently acted in a more moral fashion than Microsoft by refusing to use a fundamentally dishonest PR tactic.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
This is such an obvious hatchet job, I have to wonder if it isn't a draw for something, more ... sinister ...
:)
If it is, Brown is fucking up by the numbers. Speculation and innuendo don't go over well with judges, especially when the star material witness (Alexey Toptygin) has already effectively testified against Brown - in public.
Linus, AST, etc, have shown remarkable restraint in what amounts to a public attack on their reputations. If they decided to sue for libel, I doubt that Brown would have any defense at all. If this is all part of a more sinister plan against Linus/AST/OSS/etc, all the defense would have to do in that case is trot out Brown's public Foot-In-Ass Syndrome (and his funding daddy
Nah, Brown is just trying to justify his salary - but he's too ignorant of the reality of what he's talking about to really understand it. As far as I'm concerned, he can just go on making a fool of himself. After all, it's good publicity for (F)OSS too. If this becomes media mainstream, it's likely that there will be enough journalists who really dig into it that his foolishness makes mainstream IT publications, like SCO's has.
Cheers,
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Lots of copying going on in the OSS world.
Specifically he says lots of copyright infringement happens, but he can't find even one single example of it. Can you? No, I didn't think so.
What KB might have been trying to say is that it's not a fun thought for a corp to make a new piece of software if the OSS community is going to work feverishly to try to make a free substitute.
Boo hoo hoo. If it wasn't open source hackers trying to beat it then it would be Microsoft or some other company. Any successful product attracts competitors. Do you see HP whining about Dell selling printers? Do you think it's fun for Sony that the XBox exists?
If your company can't manage to make something better than what can be produced by hobbyists working on evenings and weekends then you don't deserve to survive.
HP does put free software out to operate its printers at least.
Morons abound... Response to a rebutal is a rejoinder... sheesh. Uneducated geeks.