Tanenbaum: Rebuttal to Ken Brown

Rebuttal to Ken Brown
        Andy Tanenbaum
        faculty of sciences
        department of computer science
        vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
[INTRO]
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.

        http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/rebuttal/

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: ...
        
        ...
        
[ 19kb plain text equivalent ]

        ...

[WRAP UP]
All in all, Brown's only argument is that he, personally, doesn't
believe a 21-year-old kid could have written an operating system kernel
in a year, despite the fact that half a dozen other people had done the
same thing earlier and the code Linus wrote wasn't all that great
initially. And faced with a whole bunch of people telling him otherwise
and the consultant he hired to examine the code saying the code is
completely different from MINIX, Brown just ignores all the facts and
persists in his belief. I'll bet he 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.

Andy Tanenbaum, 6 June 2004

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Received on Mon Jun 7 10:07:48 2004