A Wonderful Read on the History of Unix for the Folks who Know about it
Man AdTI Hired to Compare Minix/Linux Found No Copied Code Thursday, May 27 2004 @ 05:01 PM EDT http://www.groklaw.net 'Andrew Tanenbaum has published the most remarkable email from the man hired by Ken Brown to do a line-by-line comparison of Minix and Linux, Alexey Toptygin, who summarizes his findings and posts them on the Internet: "Around the middle of April, I was contacted by a friend of mine who asked me if I wanted to do some code analysis on a consultancy basis for his boss, Ken Brown. I ended up doing about 10 hours of work, comparing early versions of Linux and Minix, looking for copied code. My results are here. To summarize, my analysis found no evidence whatsoever that any code was copied one way or the other." When he turned in his work, he had a conversation with Brown: "Apparently, Ken was expecting me to find gobs of copied source code. He spent most of the conversation trying to convince me that I must have made a mistake, since it was clearly impossible for one person to write an OS and 'code theft' had to have occured. So, I guess what I want to say is, pay no attention to this man. . . " and from Andy's page Andy Tanenbaum, 20 May 2004 Speaks out! "The history of UNIX and its various children and grandchildren has been in the news recently as a result of a book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Since I was involved in part of this history, I feel I have an obligation to set the record straight and correct some extremely serious errors. But first some background information." http://www.cs.vu.nl/%7East/brown/ -- David C. Johanson Linux Counter # 116410 Powered by SuSE Linux 7.1 People who behold a phenomenon will often extend their thinking beyond it; people who merely hear about the phenomenon will not be moved to think at all. -- Goethe
David Johanson wrote:
Man AdTI Hired to Compare Minix/Linux Found No Copied Code Thursday, May 27 2004 @ 05:01 PM EDT http://www.groklaw.net
'Andrew Tanenbaum has published the most remarkable email from the man hired by Ken Brown to do a line-by-line comparison of Minix and Linux, Alexey Toptygin, who summarizes his findings and posts them on the Internet:
"Around the middle of April, I was contacted by a friend of mine who asked me if I wanted to do some code analysis on a consultancy basis for his boss, Ken Brown. I ended up doing about 10 hours of work, comparing early versions of Linux and Minix, looking for copied code.
My results are here. To summarize, my analysis found no evidence whatsoever that any code was copied one way or the other."
When he turned in his work, he had a conversation with Brown:
"Apparently, Ken was expecting me to find gobs of copied source code. He spent most of the conversation trying to convince me that I must have made a mistake, since it was clearly impossible for one person to write an OS and 'code theft' had to have occured. So, I guess what I want to say is, pay no attention to this man. . . "
and from Andy's page
Andy Tanenbaum, 20 May 2004 Speaks out!
"The history of UNIX and its various children and grandchildren has been in the news recently as a result of a book from the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Since I was involved in part of this history, I feel I have an obligation to set the record straight and correct some extremely serious errors. But first some background information."
I first saw the Linux announcement on the minix mailing list and have been a user since then. The only thing that was used from Linux in the early days was bootlace and shoelace that allowed Linux to boot from hard drives, that was about the only Minix stuff that linux rode on. Ken Brown has an agenda and he will stick to it. The one thing that amazes me is the amateurish and hamfisted efforts of such propagandists these days, Josef Goebels must be turning in his grave at attempts at propaganda, or may be people are more educated and more stupid at the same time these days and it's tuned just about right to succeed. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and keen Flyer Linux Only Shop.
participants (2)
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David Johanson -
Sid Boyce