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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..."
... Seen this before?
At what point do Tanenbaum and Torvalds decide the Brown is slandering or libelling them and actually sue for damages. Reading through Ken Brown's response to Tanenbaum I get the feeling that he's getting close to breaking the law against these two people.
John.
I wonder if the companies that have a stake in Linux like RedHat, IBM, and so forth would be willing to pony up the dough to create our own illustrious-sounding "institution" complete with a European-sounding name that could "create reports and advice to policymakers and government" that would instead be backed by the truth. Or at least the truth as we see it and not the way Micro$oft does.
I like our truth more, admittedly.
These petty squabbles with lines like "I do not suffer fools gladly" is why MS dominates. All the does is (accurately) portray the OSS camp as a bunch of squabbling, temperamental individuals.
It's not clear at all what your point is here, if you have one... A CS Professor in the Netherlands quotes the old saw, saying that he "does not suffer fools gladly" - and this is connected to what you are saying, precisely how?
I can't find the cite, but an interesting point brought up on the discussion of this on K5 is that now Brown has started poking some of the original UNIX implementors like Dennis Ritchie asking them about whether they think Tanenbaum illegally stole from UNIX when he created Minix. It's beginning to look like Brown may be seeing, okay, well if Tanenbaum's not going to play along with my slander, maybe I'll slander him too.
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.
That's not the point. Questioning is good: did Linus really write Linux is a perfectly acceptable question. Is the GPL good and (seperate question) enforcable is a good question. It only becomes foolish when, having gone to your sources and gotten your answers, you still cling to your asinine premise.
Carthago delenda est!
The thing that's started to bother me, though: Is Ken Brown just a corrupt shill who is arguing a fallaceous premise in order to make a lot of money for his corporate backers (presumably Microsoft)? Or does he actually believe his own assertions?
... when somebody handed him a bunch of money to do his Linux report, what happened, exactly? Did he yawn, scratch his belly and say, "Oh goodie, that'll keep me in spare parts for my Rolls for a while"? Or did he seriously, actually, pop another Paxil, pound his fist on the table and say, "Linux?! Those bastards! By God and all the apostles of Jesus, this is a cause I can get behind!"
I mean, he sounds quite vehement in his reply to Mr. Tanenbaum. So, I wonder
Breakfast served all day!
I suppose what the grandparent post should have said was:
/. all day, confident in their superiority.
Who's the greater fool, KB with his million dollars in "funding" from Microsoft or the people who laugh at him on
>I'll bet [Ken Brown] dismisses the widely reported claim that Mozart wrote three symphonies and performed for the King of England when he was nine on the grounds that 9-year-olds don't normally do this sort of thing.
So Linus is a prodigy like Mozart?
Even MORE reasons to use Linux!
Thank you, Mr Tanenbaum.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
How will open source negate an actual violation?
By promptly removing all traces of the violating code from their codebase, producing documentation showing that the code was presented to them as an original work, and then sending the lawyers after the person or persons who contributed the code in violation of its copyright to the open source project in the first place-- since, after all, they did consiously commit an illegal act.
If you're asking how the open source project will deal with the fact that merely being accused of something in today's legal system is a significant cost, I believe the SCO case neatly demonstrates that this is not a real problem. The community seems more than happy to support those who are deserving of support, and the SCO case has resulted in the creation of at least one general open source legal defense fund.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I have not idea how many hits a day slashdot gets but I think many people would be suprised how many people in the industry read it. What's even more likely is how many people that write for more mainstream news out lets read slashdot.
I would bet good money this gets out to the rest of the world pretty quickly.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'd love to see the book get reviewed by anyone who's ever programmed before. I love his shock at Linus's 10,000 lines in the first Linux, as if that were some huge number. I just grepped what I've coded, either for fun or school (most of it code for fun) in the past 6 years. This excludes everything that I've done for work, a fair amount of my school work, and what I've done in collaborative projects (I worked on a non-included branch of Celestia for a while, and did some code on the wd719x linux driver). I also ignored .h files and documentation. In the last 6 years, grep counted 43249 lines. However, during most of that time, my only coding was at work; I didn't feel like coding for fun.
I have started a couple new projects at home recently, and in the past five-six months they total 5529 lines. *In my spare time*. And I'm no extraordinary programmer. I think Mr. Brown has no sense of the rate programmers produce lines of code.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
In 1993, the Operating Systems class in the Computer Science department at the University of Arizona wrote a layered linux kernel in C, based on Minix and using Tannenbaum's textbook. The class was one semester, and the average team size was 3-4 people, and each team was assigned the same project, to write the layered kernel. I worked on the project alone and finished it in the semester, and I don't consider myself brilliant (only exceptional). So if a single computer science student at the UofA can do it in a semester, why not Linus in a year?
I don't understand all of the hatred for this guy. He is doing exactly what needs to be done to make linux a secure financial investment, he is: making a hypothesis that linus stole source code, and is working backwards and forwards. The police do this on a daily basis: listen to some chumps story and then investigate alternatives. This kind of legal investigation is a necessity, otherwise 10 years from now when linux is in everything someone can step up and start charging whatever they want (see SCO). He is the first of many to try to bring Linux out of it's buisness adolescence and turn it into an adult.
Why do we care?
Probably because this has a lot to do with making useful software available without requiring abusive costs to use it. Or perhaps because a hatchet job should not go unpunished. Or perhaps because we don't like those who seem to be untruthful while those who don't 'know any better' take these so called 'facts' as truth.
Win## is expensive to buy and maintain, partially because it is expensive to develop, and possibly due to corporate greed -- not good corporate stewardship, but greed. Good corporate stewardship means providing goods and services at a price that stimulates further goods and services while making respectable money for the corporation, and not getting more than fair value from the transaction. 'Fair value' is up for argument, but open source is a good 'buy' if you have the administrators to take care of it -- and please note that you need those administrators for closed source too!
It's pretty clear that Mr. Browns arguments against Linus are refuted by Mr. Tanenbaum concisely and clearly. It's also pretty clear that Mr. Brown will continue his efforts. It should therefore be clear that those of us who disagree with Mr. Brown as well as others who also seem largely to be purveyors of FUD have a job to do, and hackles to smooth.
-[joke removed for your safety]-
Bill Gates attened Lakeside high school. Lakeside got two small DEC computers on loan later in 1969 and Gates obtained a paper tape with an assembler and the source code for BASIC for a PDP-8. He used it to begin work on a BASIC interpreter.
Prior to writing his own version of BASIC, Bill had access to a source version of Ditigal Basic. So did Bill Gates and Paul Allen really write the first version of Microsoft Basic?
This might be the basis for a good book.
"I have to give credit where credit is due. Brown got that one completely right."
These lines are just one of many examples why Professor Tanenbaum should not personally try and rebut Ken Brown's statements any longer. Rather, a visit to the next police station may be appropriate to make sure that (if there is such as thing in their statute books) the prosecution has their criminal defamation lawsuit -and hopefully handcuffs- ready next time Brown dares to visit the Netherlands (or Finland for that matter).
Moreover, Professor Tanenbaum's and Torvalds' lawyers might see sufficient grounds to sue for compensation as well... and it's to them that the aggrieved should leave the talking:
According to Professor Tanenbaum's own account, he immediately identified Brown as a clueless individual who had failed to do his homework, and that was within minutes after meeting him. So the idea of Professor Tanenbaum now spending many hours or even days writing rebuttals to Ken Brown as if both of them were holding opposite but equally defendable views e.g. like two researchers involved in a bona fide scientific debate... this only gives Brown undeserved credibility and an opportunity to brag even more about "the most important people talking to me all the time."
To make things worse, replying to Brown misses the point, as from their latest piece of slander at least (even viciously insinuating, in an utterly patronizing tone, that "good" Tanenbaum was some kind of nutty professor, which reminded me of McBride's equally arrogant allegation that Eben Moglen rather than himself was the one who did not know copyright law), it is clear that the Institution does not engage in a discussion at all: As Professor Tanenbaum and others have sadly had to observe, AdTI just continue to uphold their claims even where they have been proven wrong. Rather, they are building a case for an entirely different audience in which their report will be the first and only thing ever read on this subject matter, and believed without hesitation, for among its targetted readers it commands nothing less than the sacrosanct authority of Alexis de Tocqueville (le pauvre tourne dans sa tombe...)!
Pretending that a grown-up discussion with them was possible only gives Brown a chance to assert that every word not expressly rejected had been conceded by his interlocutors. Professor Tanenbaum had to experience this already, so it should come as no surprise if the next Brown communications will be somewhere along the lines "The good professor has immediately acknowledged most of our findings, in particular that pro-Linux developers are rabid zealots."
Well, he's president of ADTI. It appears that he writes to please ADTI's contributors. No news 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.
I disagree. I think he's trying to PUBLISH a book, hence the vanity publisher others have pointed out above me. I expect that actually getting humans to go out and buy the book in a bookstore is not a part of the game plan -- In fact, I would even wager that whatever copies actually do make it off the printing presses will be snapped up by one customer - whoever paid Brown to write this hunk-a-hunk-a-burnin' trash.
[I don't remember any details, but IIRC, 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". Then, all of the "published copies" were purchased by one customer -- the org that set up the payoff -- and subsequently destroyed. Minus some printing and binding costs, it was basically a laundered political contribution. It's fuzzy, but I **think** the pages of the books were actually "printed" blank so they could save money on ink. I dunno - it sounds familiar - does anyone else remember any details about it or am I batty?]
Either way, we can clearly agree that this is most likely a low-rent PR stunt aimed at FUDding up the Linux market. The only question is who's gonna end up with the books if they ever get published?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Looks like this guy is running a campaign to google bomb adti with "Fake Research" and
"Clueless idiots" keywords. Let's help out folks!!! After all, all ADTI does is publish Fake Research conducted by
Clueless idiots
Ken Brown should try reading a book, perhaps Just For Fun. A lot of the unanswered questions that Ken Brown thinks he's raising with Linux are answered in the book. From the best of my recollection...
I see mentioned a few times that Linus wrote Linux from scratch with no programming experience, but from what I read he was basically raised a programmmer, sitting on his grandpa's lap at his computer as a young boy, watching him program. He started off programming in Assembly I believe, not C.
Also, Linus claims in the book that Linux started off as a terminal program to read his university email. He began adding various other portions of code to suit his computing needs or rewriting code that he thought could use an improvement (like the disk drivers) and then later on decided to turn them into a complete operating system.
As far as Linux being based off Minix, Linus had very fundamental disagreements with AST about how operating systems should function, even though Linus had learned a lot about how operating systems work from AST's famous book. Linus used a monolithic kernel architecture for Linux while Minix uses a microkernel architecture. It's already been proven that Linux doesn't contain code from Minix anyway, so no point in going on about it.
So this is all Linus' side of the story, but it just seems unlikely that Linus crafted this whole facade some time ago in preparation for something like this. I also think it would probably be worthwhile to include the book in Brown's research on the history of Linux, since the book is about the history of Linux. Brown just seems to have completely ignored it and drawn his own conclusions.
And to anyone who hasn't read Linus' book yet, I do recommend it. I found it fascinating and I don't even use Linux.
If you read the arguments of Ken Brown, then read what Tanenbaum has to say, it's immediately clear to someone of average intelligence that Brown does have a consistent argument--with a condition, if you take the time away. In other words, he's trying hard to argue with anachronism.
Unfortunately, most things in the world change in time, so you must be careful what you argue about. For example, according to Tanenbaum, it used to be legal to use Lions' book to teach Unix internals, until AT&T decided to forbid it. Brown would assert that Lions' notes have always been an illegal distribution, and therefore an infringement on Intellectual Property. In fact, he uses this argument to show how Tanenbaum is unaware of IP issues. But this is not true. If you can't tell how events unfold themselves in time, you'll buy his argument.
Furthermore, even if there was Minix code at the beginning for testing purposes, it would be gone by now. It's meaningless trying to argue if there is a possibility that some reminiscent of Minix is still preset in Linux. The only way to find out if that is the case is by analyzing the code line by line. The person making the claim (Ken Brown) is supposed to do that. But he didn't.
Ken Brown is free to say whatever he wants, but this just hurts his own credibility.
I once had a signature.
You miss my point. Which is, we are playing into Ken Brown's hands.
I would disagree. Silence is often taken as implied assent.
(That's probably why Dennis Ritchie's reply to Brown, from an extremely unlikely source for anything pro-Linux;)
When Tanenbaum isn't writing books about how to create operating systems and computer networks, he's writing books about how to create food. (Yes, he really did write a book titled How To Prepare Your Input.)