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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!
Why doesn't KB just cut his losses and slink away before he's made a greater fool of, if that's possible. I suspect that his check has cleared the bank by now.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
Last week we found out that Ken Brown was pregnant with Linus' love child, but this week may hold new meaning to their relationship. Will the relationship last? Or will it crumble to nothing before the masses. And find out who Ken may have been caught cheating with!
Tune in next week to find out!
Hmmm.
Anyone think we are watching a tennis match? Back and forth back and forth...
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
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.
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
...and people wonder why I don't watch soap operas anymore. Who needs them with stuff like this in real life!
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.
Critique of Ken Brown's response
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.
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?
Why, are you a lousy professor?
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
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...
I'd say being called, "the good Professor," would be preferrable to others, say for example, "the Nutty Professor."
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
No. That was the rebutal. This is the rebutal to the rebutal of the rebutal. Do try to keep up.
"'Linux is a leprosy; ...'
This statement is not grammatically, politically, or factually correct."
Is it just me, or does Professor Tanenbaum really seem like the man lately?
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.
In his own words:
"It would be skewed and bias to only quote people that are anti-Linux or anti-open source. I have done this for years..."
A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken is leaning against the
headboard smoking a cigarette, with a satisfied smile on its face.
The egg, looking a bit p*ssed off, grabs the sheet, rolls over, and says,
"Well, I guess we finally answered THAT question!"
ABOUT TUX
Ballmer: The Open Source is strong with this one
Gates: The son of Linus must not become a Coder
Ballmer: He will join us, or die, my master.
And yes, my money would be on Linus. He probably knows that Finnish kung-fu...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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/
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
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.
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.
I couldn't have summed it up better myself :)
Oh, I note on their home page that you can submit a study idea to them. How about a study into why Ken Brown is an incompetent researcher?
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
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
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
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!
KB has already done the "could not have done it at that age" argument. His next book will instead argue that Mozart was simply small and diminutive, which allowed him to lie about his age to the King of England. He was really 35 at the time.
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
Is anyone else hoping that AdTI mentions Hitler or the Nazis so that this discussion can be officially over?
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..."
Please, no need to be so polite. Tell us how you REALLY feel!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
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
"The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency ..."
Is the USPTO is even *nationally* respected any longer?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
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.
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!"
No, I think it's time that *Linus* cuts his losses and slinks away. I mean, seriously, look at what Brown brought to the table this time: "In a recent ZDNet interview(6), he denies having the Lions notes. This is also unbelievable to AdTI."
It's time that Linus fold. Brown clearly has him by the teeth and isn't going to let go until Linux admits what has been so clearly proven to us. Linus must reveal his theft of code from Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny immediately.
I suggest that Brown establish a team in cooperation with the United Nations called UNOPUS (United Nations Office for the Prevention of Un-proprietary of Software), with the goal of getting Linus to turn over precisely where he stole his code from. Linus must immediately grant them access to his house at all times, as well as pay their salaries. He must provide an errorless full and complete accounting of his coding activities dating back to the 1980s; any contradictions found should be used as an excuse to sieze his property and jail him.
His past activities show that we have no reason to trust that Linus's interests are legitimate. His failure to hand over where he stole his code from is further evidence of his guilt; if he would simply hand it over, the penalties would be much less severe. Linus is a threat to our way of life and must be stopped.
Brown should then, if Linus refuses to state where he stole his code from, Brown should give him a 48 hours ultimatum to hand over the rights of Linux to SCO, or face retribution.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
Well here's a mirror
Not more than you need, just more than you want
That alone would keep me from reading his book.
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
But the article was funny. I can't wait to see the relationship between the bunny and the Minix.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
It should be clear to anyone and everyone that Dennis Ritchie did not create the C Programming language.
Check out `man bc`. You will discover that there was a previous programming language that was written by a man named Brian Kernighan which bears striking similarities to what Mr. Ritchie would later call C.
Mr. Ritchie obviously copied wholesale from this language, with the intent to destroy the American economy, and was obviously in collusion with al-Qaeda.
Subsequent interactions between these two men were most likely based on the fact that Mr. Kernighan was ``conflicted and tense'' while in the presence of such a dangerous terrorist, and due to the fact that Mr. Kernighan was worried that his own language theft from B's predecessor, BCPL, and Martin Richards' language theft from CPL.
(Note, if you mod this, please don't mod it funny.)
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.
...is that his own consultant says he's full of it.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
"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.
I don't see why it is plausible for Canadian students to produce 16,000 lines a year but not plausible for Finnish students to produce 10,000 lines a year. It is just as cold in Finland as in Canada so programmers are never tempted to go outside.
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!
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.
The ground rules when talking to reporters or writers seem to be...
.
1. The story is already written in the writer's mind. They merely want you to supply some quotations to flesh out the "interesting" angle they have chosen
2. your comments can and will be bent to support the chosen angle.
3. some interviewers are dependent on "pushing people's buttons" to generate provocative or "sexed up" copy. If you fall into this trap, your response will become the quotable "sound bite" and the rest of your fine ideas will be pretty much buried.
The writer needs to characterize or "define" you in a word or two and if you can be induced to say something intemperate, there's the definition of yourself that you're going to see in print.
4. rebuttals and protests to the editor don't matter. Reporters and editors support their version steadfastly and with total impunity.
5. to avoid embarassment, interview with caution and be as bland and generous in your comments as you can.
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.
'That's old. We're into this string now!'
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
>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
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
Linux 0.1 was totally different to Minix. Everyone I interviewed said Linus wrote Linux 0.1 himself. But Microsoft is paying me a lot of money to say otherwise. I love money, and don't care what I have to do to get it. Microsoft even gave me a copy of the same script Darl McBride is using. It's a literary masterpiece, and totally not derived from any other work ever. Look for the AdTI Review of Books, coming out soon. P.S. Anyone else notice how I didn't accuse Dennis Ritchie of remembering anything about Multics when he worked on Unix? That's because a friend of a friend of mine owns UNIX, and they would be upset if I slandered its provenance.
--
I wrote a book. All by myself. In less than six months.
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.
SOFT WARS
Darth McBride: The Source is strong with this one
Emperor Bilgatine: The son of Linus must not become a Coder
Darth McBride: He will join us, or die, my master.
Ricstawaca the Wookie: ROOOOAAR!
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.
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.)
Ken brown is a troll and should be ignored forthrightly.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Very funny, Ken, you can stop astroturfing now. :)
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
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]-
The fishs translation (which is pretty hillarious in itself) can be found here.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
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.
"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."
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,
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.
what a hoot. a guy using a web hosting service from one of the biggest users of open source to distribute broadsides condemning open source.
mp
"The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets." -- Whitfield Diffie
One man couldn't possibly write so much crap in such a short time. I'm sure parts of it must be written by somebody else, and included in the Brown Book with or without permissions.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
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
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
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?
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
More important! Is it likely that a student (a single person) with no Tennis experience, without any use of written Tennis rules, could build a functioning Pong game in six months? :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
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.
Every time I see this name, I read it as "toqueville" (maybe because I'm from Michigan). I keep picturing some little town in the northern part of the US or Canada where the whole population walks around wearing wool hats.
One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duck tape to make them stop. ~G.M. Weilacher
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.
(emphasis added)
Well, you can say that again...
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.
AdTI here demanding $60,000 from lawyers of Philip Morris to start a media campaign.
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.)
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.
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".
Imagine a beowulf cluster of THOSE - you could generate blue screens at an INCREDIBLE rate!!
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
HP does put free software out to operate its printers at least.
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.