Linus Not The Father Of Linux, According to Report 867
MrIrwin writes "According to this article on Yahoo, Linus is not the real father of Linux and Open source software is really just code nicked from other sources. " Groklaw has done a dissection of the press release. It's a press release by the Alexis de Toqueville Institution, who gets funding from MSFT, as well as believes that US IT troubles are because of free software. Oh, and terrorism works better because of open source, and the "Star Wars" program was a good idea.
Sounds more like MS/DOS (Score:3, Informative)
He also admits to reading the assembly listings from for DEC Basic before writing his own completely original Basic interpreter.
I do wish this "institute" was based in France where it is illegal to falsify history.
Some help (Score:1, Informative)
Linux started out as a Minix clone. Though it is more than that now, it's roots lie much closer to Andy Tannenbaum than they do to the Finn.
Register article.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds more like MS/DOS (Score:5, Informative)
AdTI: Handouts for Neocons (Score:4, Informative)
Fact: AdTI employs John Norquist [adti.net], the not-so-big-time younger brother of big-time conservative activist Grover Norquist [mediatransparency.org].
Fact: AdTI president Ken Brown's sole research qualification is a BA in English from George Mason [digital-law.net]. He has built a career out of milking shady publications [washingtontimes.com], agent-of-foreign-power lobby groups [americanswiss.org], and dubious business-academica-government incest groups. [city.ac.uk]
Half of the links from the AdTI front page are broken. The other half send you to repositories of op-eds and recorded radio shows.
This is not a research institute. Not even a bad research institute. This is a demi-journalistic hack shop where goldbricking bottomfeeders of right-wing policy studies and editorial-writing filch cash from gullible corporations in return for hastily-written hokum.
Please do not post any more from these con artists. I'm sure they get paid by the hit.
SCO, condensed (Score:4, Informative)
no need for a study, just watch the movie (Score:3, Informative)
www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/
Re:Linus Not The Father Of Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What a farce. (Score:4, Informative)
SCO Named to the SD Times 100 (Score:3, Informative)
"Star Wars" (Score:1, Informative)
The SDI was and is a good idea.
Murky FUD (Score:5, Informative)
"As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers."
I think the lineage to Unix via minix is obvious. Linus wrote his own kernel. The other pieces may have already existed, but the kernel was new. Unless he stole it from another Linus who conveniently named the project "Linux" after himself.
Over the last 13 years, many others contributed to the kernel and development which, according to SCO, may have included some questionable copy-paste commands, but I think the beginning is clear and the origins are clearly cited.
See here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1991O
I'm not sure the author of the article really understands what Linux is and what Linux is not. He is right about varying degress of fanaticism and the very loose definition of "open source." No matter where you get your software, you're at the mercy of the developer to maintain it--commercial or open source. For example, I think the Linux community has been very good about responding to security issues compared to much larger corporations who have a very loose definition of quality control. When those corporations begin to loose money to smaller groups who out perform, then those corporations pay for studies that skew the truth and spread FUD.
Read the article--the math isn't all that fuzzy.
Re:AdTI: Handouts for Neocons (Score:5, Informative)
Using John Norquist as the example here is a bad idea, since (even though his brother may be conservative) John Norquist is in fact quite the liberal (Up until a few months ago, he was mayor of Milwaukee, where I live, for many,many years).
Hardly the "Neocon" you claim him to be.
Re:Seeing as they like history...... (Score:2, Informative)
If you're talking about the link between NT and VMS, this [winntmag.com] or this [sympatico.ca] would be a much better read. If not, then... what the hell are you talking about?
Star Wars did what it was supposed to do. (Score:3, Informative)
Gosh, Hemos. Last time I looked the Star Wars program had done EXACTLY what it was intended to do: Convince the Soviet Union / Russian Empire that it could no longer afford to play the superpower game. This led to its attempt to give the people JUST ENOUGH freedom to get some innovation done, and from there to its collapse without a thermonuclear shot fired.
Maybe the Star Wars program would never have been able to shoot down incoming ICBMs. Or maybe it would have. Or maybe it would have but not enough of them (and missing even one would ruin a lot of people's whole day). We'll never know. But it definitely ended the Cold War without having to fight WW III.
"Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting." Sun Tzu would be proud.
Re:The road goes both ways (Score:2, Informative)
NT == N-Ten (== later Intel i960) (Score:5, Informative)
After it became clear for MS that i960 would never became a generic-purpose processor it was first meant to be, and that its release would get significally delayed, MS started quickly to work with an i386 port of NT. It did not took long, as at that time they did not have much except kernel ready, and it was quick to port as Cutler had insisted portable code without excessive asm optimisations.
(Disclaimer: everything IIRC)
Re:Seeing as they like history...... (Score:1, Informative)
Yep. Microsoft came very late to the GUI party. Windows 3.1, which was the first usable version of Windows, came out in 1991, IIRC.
But half a decade earlier, off the top of my head, there were already GUIs running on Xerox machines, the Mac, the Commodore 64 (Geos), the Amiga, and the Atari ST.
Even on DOS, before Windows 3.1, there were at least two working GUIs, namely Gem, and Geoworks.
And, in truth, Microsoft didn't manage to produce a real, modern GUI until Windows 95 -- five years after Geoworks, and a decade after the Mac, and the Amiga.
I would call the Alexis de Toqueville Institution incompetent, if not for the fact that I am more concerned with their dishonesty.
Re:Libel / Slander? (Score:4, Informative)
Linux origins originally came from an educational book called "Operating Systems: Design & Implementation" The book came with illustrative examples called Minix. It could potentially be argued that the father of Linux is therefore the author of Minix Andrew Tanenbaum.
An interesting quote from the book. Tanenebaum (in response to a ban on discussing Unix code) : "He realised that the only way to make somenthing comparable available to his students was to write an operating system on my own that would be system call compatible with Unix" -- that is, working in exactly the same way -- "but which was my own code, not using any AT&T code at all."
Linus spent some time hacking with Minix but eventually found that he wanted something more "a better Minix, than Minix" thus the idea was borne.
Anyway go read the book [amazon.com] its fascinating
Re:Seeing as they like history...... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Seeing as they like history...... (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks to "Assembly Language for Intel-Based Computers" by Kip R. Irvine (ISBN 0-13-091013-9) for keeping me factual...
6. Windows NT definitely contains some code from OS/2, which Microsoft ended up licensed to have because of the event you allude to. And, it was authored primarily (in the core) by VMS developers. I'm to lazy to look up which, unfortunately, but the information is readily available.
Re:That is not terribly accurate (Score:5, Informative)
Linus was never an intern at Bell Labs.
Linux was originally written in Linus' bedroom at his mom's apartment in Helsinki, Finland. Linus was attending University at the time.
Linux started out as a little terminal program for reading Linus' email - I believe he could boot right into it without having to load MINIX. Linus kept adding features to it until it became more of an OS Kernel, and then other people started helping out with development.
Linus was impressed with the Unix philosophy and design, but saw limits in MINIX.
Linux never had MINIX code in it.
Linux was already very popular by the time Linus moved from Finland to California. Linus went to work for Transmeta. More recently, Linus moved to OSDL.
As far as we know, Linus has never worked around actual Unix System V source code, nor with AT&T or Bell Labs.
Linux was written to published POSIX standards.
There is no reason to believe that Linux contains anything but 100% original code, donated by Linus and a group of volunteers around the world. It does look like SGI once mistakenly contributed a small amount of System V code in one of their hardware drivers, but that code was redundant and soon removed from the kernel.
Audits on Linux code have now been performed by SGI and by a an open-source "insurance" firm. Probably others have also done audits.
These comparisons done between Linux and Unix have revealed very little similarity at the code level. Even SCO's lawyers now admit that there are no significant code similarities between Linux and System V. You will recall that SCO was not able to produce the apparent "millions" of lines of stolen code when ordered to do so by the Judge. Of course we can't find the code, SCO, said, because it's from AIX, not from System V.
Re:NT == N-Ten (== later Intel i960) (Score:3, Informative)
I happen to have the u860 board from IBM (Microchannel.....) and the machien to stick it into including all the support software and compilers (metaware.. bit limited but nice code)
It was the first piece of hardware I had at home that managed to generate 800x600x256 mandelbrot images at a rate high enough to make realtime animations (yeah, the code thta did that took quite some shortcuts tho not as 'bad' as Xaos, think more in the line of loop detection and making use of already calculated data from previous frames)
I'm still trying to figure out what the hell they were smoking when they made that CPU tho.. its way cool and yet its just too weird and impractical to make any real use of it for general purpose computing.
Very interestng piece of hardware tho, thanks for bringing back some nice memories
Re:Seeing as they like history...... (Score:4, Informative)
My dad came up with the perfect solution a long time ago, and when I got Old Enough To Get In Trouble, he told it to me. I'll tell it to you, now.
"Son, unless you want to pay for a kid, keep it in your pants."
I suspect a lot of people on Slashdot follow this advice (whether they want to or not
Re:That is not terribly accurate (Score:3, Informative)
Bell Labs gets no credit for this one.
Re:Born in a Whore House (Score:3, Informative)
While I believe there was some 'dumpster diving' by the teenage gates to learn a little about coding various things, it was basically a hack job of him and paul allen on an emulator whacking together assembler for the soon-to-be altair.
or to put it another way.... It was assembler code and there was no where to steal the code from cos the platform didnt exist yet.
Now more interesting;- did bill pay the bill(lol) for all that borrowed mainframe time
Re:Microsoft's history of dishonesty and crime (Score:5, Informative)
If you insist...
Evidence of sabotage and fraud in The Sun vs Microsoft case [sun.com]:
Memo to Bill Gates from the manager responsible for Microsoft's Java strategy:
> When I met with you last, you had a lot of pretty pointed questions about Java, so I want to make sure I understand your issues/concerns....
> 1. What is our business model for Java?
> 2. How do we wrest control of Java away from Sun?
> 3. How do we turn Java into just the latest, best way to write Windows applications?
> 4. What are we doing to leverage/expose Windows to Java developers?
Microsoft's pricing strategy paper for its VJ++ development suite:
> The "strategic objective" of its new toolkit is to "Eliminate/contain cross-platform Java by growing the polluted Java market," "migrate and lock Java developers to Win32 Java," and ultimately to "kill cross-platform Java by grow[ing] the polluted Java market."
Statement by a Microsoft vice president:
> I would explicitly be different -- just to be different.... [W]ithout something to pollute Java more to Windows (show new cool features that are only in Windows) we expose ourselves to more portable code on other platforms.
Another Microsoft memo:
> At this point its [sic] not good to create MORE noise around our win32 java classes. Instead we should just quietly grow j++ share and assume that people will take advantage of our classes without ever realizing they are building win32-only java apps.
Evidence of contract interference and extortion in The DOJ versus Microsoft case [usdoj.gov]:
> "Content drives browser adoption, and we need to go to the top five sites and ask them, "What can we do to get you to adopt IE?" We should be prepared to write a check, buy sites, or add features -- basically do whatever it takes to drive adoption."
> Gates wrote, "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office...."
> In Waldman's words: Sounds like we give them the HTML control for nothing except making IE the "standard browser for Apple?" I think they should be doing this anyway. Though the language of the agreement uses the word "encourage," I think that the spirit is that Apple should be using it everywhere and if they don't do it, then we can use Office as a club.
Evidence of intentional destruction of standard protocols in the Microsoft Halloween Document [opensource.org]:
> "OSS projects have been able to gain a foothold in many server applications because of the wide utility of highly commoditized, simple protocols. By extending these protocols and developing new protocols, we can deny OSS projects entry into the market."
And so on.
There is so much evidence that this (sabotage, fraud, and extortion) is Microsoft's normal way of operating, that the "zealot" position is anyone who attempts to claim that Microsoft is honest.
As to what Microsoft is currently trying to do to defeat Linux, there was obviously some speculation there, which I indicated by repeated use of the word "possibly."
Linus has weighed in on this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Seeing as they like history...... (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, the Altair 8800 hadn't even been RELEASED yet, when they developed Basic for it: they wrote it to run on the emulator that they had written to run on the PDP-10.
The funny bit? Because it was all emulated, they never needed to actually LOAD Basic onto their test "machine", so they never wrote a loader. Paul Allen wound up coding one up ON THE PLANE TO ALBUQUERQUE to demo the finished product! (hey, it had to be keyed into the unit from the front panel switches, anyway.)
Re:Seeing as they like history...... (Score:2, Informative)
This is news to me. Perhase a little is true; however, Windows NT was designed and originally marketed to run on multiple platforms: Intel x86, MIPS, and Alpha. Microsoft took care of the x86 platform, but each vendor took care of the ports to MIPS and Alpha. In theory, only the Hardware Abstraction Layer needed work. As we all know, the MIPS and Alpha were hardly raging successes, and they eventually faded out and NT support killed by DEC and MIPS.
Applications were supposed to be available in a variety of flavors: One for each platform that ran NT. Since no one took the time to port apps to MIPS or Alpha, there wasn't much demand. The Alpha was the fastest platform to run NT for quite some time, but the Pentiums got better, and the Alphas didn't keep up.
But now? No USSR, we still have NMD (Star Wars)? (Score:3, Informative)
If it was only to be used as a bargaining chip against the Soviet Union, why is the US still developing it, under the new label of National Missile Defense (NMD), when the Soviet Union doesn't exist? Oh, right, the Bush administration says it's a way to defend against terrorists -- and we all know how likely it is that terrorists will use a complex ICBM when a nuclear device in a shipping container would be so much simpler.
More about the "Farce and Fraud" of the National Missile Defense program can be found via this chart [abolishnukes.com] and accompanying document [abolishnukes.com].
Sounds like a government jobs program to me, and a dangerous one at that. I'll just keep hoping [blogspot.com] for "Regime Change 2004"...
Re:Seeing as they like history...... (Score:3, Informative)
"Son, unless you want to pay for a kid, keep it in your pants."
You are not paying attention.
The above post was talking about someone who did keep it in their pants. If the mother says you are the father, then you pay. Whether in fact you are the father does not matter. That is the issue of "hijacking a man's wallet for 18+ years".
Tannenbaum was first with Minix (Score:3, Informative)
I still have the binder and all the floppies. Wonder if they can still be read.
That was surely open source unix before Linux
Re:Seeing as they like history...... (Score:2, Informative)
> as if 3.1 was the first version of windows ever
Actually there was GEOS (Commodore 64), AmigaOS, Atari TOS, Mac and porbably some more before Windows.
Hell even today AmigaOS has features Windows users can only dream of..
I recall Billy stated at the time it was imposible to have a full multitasking OS in under 1MB. That was when AmigaOS was only a 512 MB ROM and two 440KB floppies, of which 75% was largely extras and add-ons..
Re:Seeing as they like history......DLM (Score:3, Informative)
1. Cutler used VMS architectectural ideas in WinNT (Published fact)
2. One MAJOR ommission - probably the most important - was the Distributed Lock Manager (DLM) - which made VMS clustering work
3. Oracle via its purchase of Digital RDB IP and later licensing from Compaq have made the DLM the basis for their Real Application Cluster (RAC) technology
4. Had the DLM been licensed by M$ then WinNT etc may have had decent clustering (NB: A good DLM is critical to making clusters scale) - M$ didnt and suffer today because of that
5. HP are sitting on a goldmine of formerly Digital IP and like Digital cannot market it - very sad
6. Oracle are making huge forward steps standing on the shoulders of others