Samizdat (Kenneth Brown)

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Samizdat is an open source work published in 2004 . Author Kenneth Brown , president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (ADTI), a politically conservative -oriented think tanks . It was not published in print, but can be downloaded from the Internet. It claims, among other things, that Linus Torvalds could not possibly have written the first Linux kernel alone in 1991 , but rather copied it from Minix without naming this system as the source.

criticism

The work was criticized by open source representatives and the developers of the software concerned as unscientific. Several people named by Brown as sources, including FSF President Richard Stallman and Unix developer Dennis Ritchie , stated that they were misrepresented or misrepresented. Eric S. Raymond called the work a "catastrophe". Andrew Tanenbaum , the author of Minix, published an extensive commentary in which he denied Brown's claims as untenable. Tanenbaum cited, among other things, a study commissioned by Brown that did not reveal any noticeable matches in the source code of Linux and Minix, but is not mentioned in the book. According to an online journal, the author of the study was asked by a friend

“Would I be interested in doing a little code analysis for his employer, Kenneth Brown. So it came about that I spent about ten hours comparing early Linux versions with Minix to find code copied from Minix. To sum it up, my analysis gave absolutely no indication that any code was being adopted. When I called [Kenneth Brown] to ask if he had any questions about the analytical method used, the results, and whether he would like the analysis to be repeated using other tools, a blue miracle awaited me. Apparently, Ken expected me to find a bunch of copied source code. He spent most of the conversation trying to convince me that I must have made a mistake somewhere, since it was clear that a single person could not possibly write an operating system and that code theft must have taken place. "

Tanenbaum and others suspected that the purpose of samizdat was from the outset to put Linux or open source in general in a bad light. In fact, it became known that the AdTI had received funding from Microsoft , which Linux then viewed as a threat, as the Halloween documents showed.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' of Open Source Code (PDF; 468 kB)
  2. ↑ LinuxInsider.com: Stallman: accusatory Report Deliberately Confuses
  3. ↑ groklaw.net: Dennis Ritchie's interview for Samizdat
  4. ↑ Eric S. Raymond: Samizdat: Stinks on Ice
  5. ^ Andrew Tanenbaum: Some Notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle
  6. ↑ Source comparison of early Linux and minix versions
  7. ↑ IT Pro: The real fathers of Linux? . www.itpro.co.uk. Retrieved June 13, 2008.
  8. ↑ Wired News: Did MS Pay for Open Source Scare?

Web links