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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..."
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.
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.
Critique of Ken Brown's response
For an even funnier laugh, I recommend reading this one Is Brown Really the Father of Samizdat? - A Parody by Justin Moore to counter the Fake Research, hmm did I mention about their Fake Research?
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.
Not true - as mentioned elswhere here and on Groklaw, it's being published by a "vanity" press, which means no huge advances, royalties, or anything. He'll be lucky to break even on the publishing costs.
C|N>K
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!"
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
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!
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
But Pong is based on Tennis... surely noone could have written Pong without violating the intellectual property belonging to the makers of Tennis?
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
Is anyone else hoping that AdTI mentions Hitler or the Nazis so that this discussion can be officially over?
"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.
-
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.
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..."
"How will open source user's be assured that they won't be pulled into court because of some actual or alleged stolen code?"
How will closed source user's be assured that they won't be pulled into court because of some actual or alleged stolen code?
Why should open source shoulder all of the doubt?
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
"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
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.
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.
The fishs translation (which is pretty hillarious in itself) can be found here.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
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?
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.
We can conspire about why he's so driven to his (repeatedly refuted) belief that Linus couldn't have written Linux without ripping someone else's code off all day, but the fact remains that KB's own consultants have contradicted him!
I used to be a TA for CS452 Real-Time Programming course at the University of Waterloo. The assignments for that course came in two parts: (1) design and implement your own real-time multitasking kernel, and (2) use it to design and implement a real-time control system for either a robot arm or a model train.
The students had about a month and a half to complete the first part, which was broken into four assignments. The kernels had a microkernel architecture, but I don't think that really alters the development time that much. (The message passing was highly synchronous, which helps to limit the mind-boggling complexity of debugging a distributed program, which Dr. Tanenbaum doesn't seem to discuss.)
They worked in teams of two, but when I took the course, my lab partner conked out on me, so I ended writing the kernel myself, but that was okay since I had written multitasking kernels twice before, one in MACHINE LANGUAGE (no, not that wimpy symbolic-assembler stuff!) for a Commodore-128.
So, it's quite do-able for a motivated student to write a relatively simple kernel in the amount of time that Linus took. Just ask the CS452 students--they had to build their kernels in just six weeks, plus they had other courses and limited resources in the lab.
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.
Has it not become obvious to you all yet?
AdTI and Ken Brown are the creation of bored Slashdot trolls. Isn't it obvious? Where else do you find such a collection of glaringly faulty logic, complete ignorance and unwillingness to concede even a single fact mixed with such polished grammar and pomposity?
Expect to see "YHBT. YHL. HAND." on their home page any day now.
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.