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> there were fellow travelers with various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in deniable ways. The ones that stick in my mind were a guy called Florian
by Nursie 5y ago
> there were fellow travelers with various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in deniable ways.
The ones that stick in my mind were a guy called Florian Mueller who seemed unreasonably determined that Linux was ‘stolen’ and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution which put out papers claiming that Linux could not have been written by Linus as operating systems are just too complex, and must have been borrowed from Minix.
Both appear to have had significant Microsoft backing.
- ghaff 5y agoI actually knew the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution guy (Greg Fossedal) fairly well at the time and had a fairly long history with him. I don't think I ever got him to understand open source principles and he was always rather rooted in academic principles. In that vein, Linux definitely was bootstrapped from Minix but, at least arguably, there's never been a lot of formal acknowledgement of Minix' contribution to Linux. Even if everything was entirely legit from a license perspective. ADDED: In other words, Greg always most objected to the lack of citation more than anything else--which is very important in an academic context.
- Nursie 5y agoLinux wasn’t bootstrapped from Minix in any meaningful way though, even if it was inspiration (and that would be quite a claim to make given Minix is a microkernel design and linux is a monolith), and Andrew Tannenbaum weighed in on that at the time. Further, it wasn’t just lack of attribution - specific allegations of copying were made as well as appeals to incredulity - one person could never write an OS! It must all be stolen! He was flat out wrong and he put his efforts into spreading FUD about it while taking money from Microsoft, all while the SCO stuff was going on. It’s very hard to see his efforts as anything other than paid-for propaganda.
- mindcrime 5y agoAgreed. This seems especially apparent in light of the "Torvalds / Tannenbaum Debate"[1] that occurred back in the early days of Linux. It's not like Andrew Tannenbaum came out and said "Hey kid you stole my code." No, instead he came out and said "This OS of yours is obsolete and a step back into the 1970's" (paraphrased slightly). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...
- CRConrad 5y ago> ...and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution Institution --> Institute, IIRC?
- Nursie 5y agoThat’s what I thought too, but Wikipedia tells me otherwise: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Institution https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Instit...