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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..."
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.
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!
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.
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.