"Lone Coder" - AdTI, funded by Microsoft, denies that Linus Torvalds was the "lone coder" inventor of Linux !

James McIntosh jemcinto-cpI+UMyWUv+w5LPnMra/2Q at public.gmane.org
Mon Jun 11 12:58:34 UTC 2007


"Lone Coder" - AdTI, funded by Microsoft, denies that Linus Torvalds was
the "lone coder" inventor of Linux !

http://www.cbronline.com/article_cbr.asp?guid=F8EBD1F4-A2AE-4A24-BF1A-0F70CA
8737CA

Computer Business Review Online
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
----
Analysis: Whose Linux Is It Anyway?
1st June 2004
By Matthew Aslett

Controversy continues to surround the Linux operating system as a
mysterious think tank has claimed that Linus Torvalds did not write it.
Matthew Aslett attempts to discover the truth.

You can forget about whether the Linux operating system contains SCO
Group's Unix code, the big question for this month is exactly who invented
Linux, according to the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI).

The controversial AdTI has released excerpts from a forthcoming book by
AdTI president Kenneth Brown that it says "directly challenges Linus
Torvalds' claim to be the inventor of Linux." It says that the study is
based on extensive interviews with leading technologists including the
founder of the GNU project, Richard Stallman, one of the originators of
Unix, Dennis Ritchie, and writer and Minix Unix clone creator Andrew
Tanenbaum.

Torvalds has responded in his own inimitable style. In a posting to the
LinuxWorld site he wrote: "OK, I admit it. I was just a front man for the
real fathers of Linux, the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. They (for obvious
reasons) couldn't step forward to admit that they had gotten bitten by the
computer bug, and had been developing a series of operating systems on
their own during the off season."

"They started to look for a front man," he continued, "and since Santa
Claus is from Finland and thus has connections to Helsinki University, and
the tooth fairy claimed 'He's got good strong teeth,' I got selected."

While many in the open source community may have taken AdTI's claims for a
joke, in an interview with CBR, Brown appeared deadly serious. He said that
his research had thrown up doubts about how quickly the kernel was written,
Torvalds' own experience of operating system design, and a lack of
attribution for Minix.

"His experience is certainly questionable," said Brown. "It just doesn't
seem right. The Unix kernel was written in over three years. He claims to
have written it [Linux] in less than six months."

Brown maintained that there could be attribution or copyright problems in
the operating system kernel. "There has been no credit of attribution to
Prentice Hall [the publishers of Minix]," he said. "It's questionable in my
opinion if the kernel is a derivative product of someone else's product."

The lone coder explanation has become the accepted version of the early
Linux kernel development process, but Brown maintains there were other
coders on the grassy knoll whose stories had gone 'unreported' in favour of
Torvalds' claim to have created Linux from scratch. "Starting from scratch
means you started with nothing, he did not do that. To me it's un-debatable
that Prentice Hall has lost out."

Andrew Tanenbaum, now professor of computer science at Vrije University,
Amsterdam, is not convinced, however. "Scientifically it's nice to give
credit to your sources, but there's no intellectual property problems.
Nobody stole it from them [Prentice Hall]," he told CBR.

"Yes he had Minix, there's a lot of traces of Minix in Linux," he
continued. "He's not violating any intellectual property rights, the source
code is available. He didn't even copy Minix, which I criticised him for,"
added Tanenbaum, referring to a famous Usenet argument between the two in
1992.

It is certainly no secret that Torvalds' development of Linux began as a
clone of Minix, the Unix clone designed by Tanenbaum for educational
purposes. Torvalds' initial announcement of Linux in August 1991 was
addressed to Minix users on a Minix newsgroup and noted that they shared a
resemblance, specifically in the physical layout of the file-system.

It is also worth noting that while Torvalds may have written the 0.01
version of the Linux kernel himself, as well as the 0.10 follow-up released
in September 1991, as early as version 0.11 (December 1991) he had already
begun the process of accepting contributions from other enthusiasts that
would rapidly increase the rate of Linux's development.

Tanenbaum added that he met Brown on 23 March and told him that it was
perfectly plausible that Torvalds wrote the original Linux kernal on his
own. "It had already been done by four or five individuals," Tanenbaum told
CBR, counting himself among those who had written a Unix clone kernel,
along with Ken Thompson, who had done much of the early work on Unix alone.
"The fifth time around it isn't that difficult when there's four others out
there."

Tanenbaum said he was surprised by Brown's lack of understanding of the
history of Linux and Unix. "He didn't have any answers," he said. "I began
asking 'who's behind this, who's funding the book?' It seemed very
suspicious to start with."

It is not the first time that the AdTI has provoked the open source
community. In June 2002 it published a white paper arguing open sourcing of
source code leaves users vulnerable to terrorist attack, a report that was
lampooned by the open source community and discredited after Wired quoted a
Microsoft spokesperson confirming that it had provided funding to AdTI.

©2007 Computer Business Review & CBRonline.com


James ('Jim') E. McIntosh
<jemcinto-cpI+UMyWUv+w5LPnMra/2Q at public.gmane.org>
416-292-8126


--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists





More information about the Legacy mailing list