21 May 2004

There has never been any question about the fact that Linux was very open about taking a lot of good ideas from Unix

Linux creator, Linus Torvalds, and the professor who wrote the book that inspired young Finnish college student Linus, strike back publicly at what appears to be an astroturf assault by a Microsoft funded think tank Alexis de Tocqueville Institution.

A little reflection from Tanenbaum on Ken Brown's motivation:

In his email, Linus said that Brown never contacted him. No email, no phone call, no personal interview. Nothing. Considering the fact that Brown was writing an explosive book in which he accused Linus of not being the author of Linux, you would think a serious author would at least confront the subject with the accusation and give him a chance to respond. What kind of a reporter talks to people on the periphery of the subject but fails to talk to the main player?

Why did Brown fly all the way to Europe to interview me and (and according to an email I got from his seat-mate on the plane) one other person in Scandinavia, at considerable expense, and not at least call Linus? Even if he made a really bad choice of phone company, how much could that cost? Maybe a dollar? I call the U.S. all the time from Amsterdam. It is less than 5 cents a minute. How much could it cost to call California from D.C.?

From reading all the comments posted yesterday, I am now beginning to get the picture. Apparently a lot of people (still) think that I 'hate' Linus for stealing all my glory (see below for more on this). I didn't realize this view was so widespread. I now suspect that Brown believed this, too, and thought that I would be happy to dump all over Linus to get 'revenge.' By flying to Amsterdam he thought he could dig up dirt on Linus and get me to speak evil of him. He thought I would back up his crazy claim that Linus stole Linux from me. Brown was wrong on two counts. First, I bear no 'grudge' against Linus at all. He wrote Linux himself and deserves the credit. Second, I am really not a mean person. Even if I were still angry with him after all these years, I wouldn't choose some sleazy author with a hidden agenda as my vehicle. My home page gets 2500 hits a week. If I had something to say, I could put it there.

Andy Tanenbaum developed a operating system called MINIX for use as a teaching tool for his classes on the subject matter. Linus desired to network his PC and set out to build a microcomputer version of UNIX based on the textbook material on MINIX. The professor and the young visionary had a much celebrated heated usenet exchange which led to the expulsion of Linux banter from comp.os.minix.

Comments

No comments yet

Add Comment

This item is closed, it's not possible to add new comments to it or to vote on it