| Weblog: | Finding Ken Brown's Lies | |
| Subject: | You miss his argument | |
| Date: | 2004-06-05 18:51:09 | |
| From: | chromatic | |
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Response to: You miss his argument
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I disagree. Brown clearly wants people to believe that it was impossible for Linus to have written Linux without any outside influences. No one's disputing that, except Brown's strawmen.
As far back as I can remember (1995 or 1996 at the latest), people talked about Linux as inspired by Minix. This is not the behavior of a group of people involved in a coverup.
If Brown wanted to make a serious argument, he should have covered the possibility that Linus and Linux advocates are telling the truth, that Unix and kernels were understood well enough in 1991 that Linus could have produced a functional kernel in several months. (POSIX started in 1985, for example.) |
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Showing messages 1 through 4 of 4.
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You miss his argument
2004-06-06 18:33:56 kollivier [Reply | View]
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You miss his argument
2004-06-06 19:08:40 aristotle [Reply | View]
How do you suppose this is to be "proven"? Ken Brown tasked someone with comparing the sources of Minix and some versions of Linux in order to have something to blather about in his screed. The guy came up empty. What more is left to say? -
You miss his argument
2004-06-07 08:36:49 kollivier [Reply | View]
Thanks! Believe it or not, I had not seen that information and thus did not know it even existed.
Now what would be great is if someone from the OSS community would *formally* respond to Ken Brown and show the evidence as to why he must insinuate things for which he provides no hard evidence. This information clearly puts egg on his face, and someone should most certainly make sure that Brown's "target audience" sees him with said egg on his face. ;-)
This is particularly damaging to the credability of a researcher, and there won't be many who are willing to jump up and sacrifice their career to lie for a company, unless there's a TON of money involved. (And if that's the case, the company will most certainly not want to risk it on weak information like in this case.)
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You missed the history
2004-06-06 07:33:39 Moshe [Reply | View]
KB first claimed that Linus had stolen code.
When Brown couldn't get proof, even after the most tortured, leading questions from people he thought would be hostile to Linus he twisted their words to try to support his theft case.
When they (Tanenbaub, Stallman & Ritchie) came out and cried 'FOUL!!!' Brown retreated to his current stance.
What is the current stance, really? While the theft angle is almost gone, (it's still lurking in there in the weaselly wording) in a nutshell it's something like
"without having been educated in how OSes work Linus would never have written Linux."
Or
"Without knowledge Linus could never have written Linux".
Well, DUHHH... Ritchie had Knowledge too, of the state of the art at his time. Tanenbaum had knowledge too, about the state of the art at his time.
Brown's current stance has disintegrated, moving away from direct accusations of theft to "if some projects take a long time then all projects must, and those projects that don't take a long time have cheated in some way."
| Showing messages 1 through 4 of 4. |
As far as I can tell in my research, MINIX was moved to the BSD license in 2000. The previous license, also from what I could determine, required licensing for any commercial usage. Thus, any code in Linux that may have come from MINIX could have been a violation of the licensing terms prior to the 2000 licensing change, and this is what Ken Brown is stipulating. (He's effectively saying that Tanenbaum knew there was a problem and tried to get the license changed *because of this*, to protect Linus.)
Is there any truth to this argument? I don't know, really, but no one has said "no" outright. They just keep slamming Ken Brown and saying he has no point, without really saying *why* his points are invalid. He as much as says that people like Tanenbaum aren't going to make his points for him - he's saying they're protecting Linus. The question is: could Linux being inspired by Minix have been a problem (i.e. is there actual code copied), and is it a problem that Linus simply ignored or never considered? I think people's tendency to be "vocal" about the Minix origins were probably because for a long time no one ever thought this was actually a problem. (i.e. most people didn't realize there were any licensing issues at all.)
What I'd like to see is a clear refutal, based on hard evidence, of Ken Brown's "facts", and the OSS community has stepped to the plate before, with SCO's FUD, even though they all knew it was FUD. That was because it was important to clearly show the lies and deception their arguments are based on. With Ken Brown, everyone's saying he doesn't have a point, but they skirt around the issue of whether or not Linus actually copied code from Minix. Heck, many people have called it Linux's "precursor". So where's the evidence that no IP rights were broken?