Linus not Linux, part III
Posted on June 5, 2004
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 37 views |
I’m starting to feel sorry for Ken Brown over at AdTI (well ok, no not really) because the poundings just keep on coming. At some point this guy won’t be able to get within six feet of a computer before it starts spewing nasty invectives in his direction.
If you don’t know who Ken Brown or AdTI are, pop on over to these posts and familliarize yourself with his antics, in which he decides that Linus Torvalds in fact could not have written Linux himself and therefore must have stolen it:
Linus apparently not the daddy of Linux
Linus not Linix, part II
Interesting theory, except he seems to be the only one in the whole wide world web who believes it and everyone else is currently ripping him a new hole over it. When you’re the only person in the world, out of six billion people, who believes in something, you’re either dead wrong or Albert Einstein about to come up with the special theory of relativity. Dude, you’re no Albert Einstein.
Recently into the fray comes Eric Raymond, who was apparently sent a preview copy of the book, now titled Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the `Source’ of Open Source Code, by the AdTI. Wow, was that ever a mistake because Raymond comes out with no mercy in Samizdat: Stinks on Ice. To wit, Raymond:
…this book is a disaster. Many of the claimed facts are bogus, the logic is shoddy, some of the people you claim to have used as important sources have already blasted you for inaccuracy, and at the end of the day you will have earned nothing but ridicule for it.
…
“Is it possible that building a Unix operating system really only takes a few months and, oh by the way, you don’t even need the source code to do it?” Yes, it is possible, because there are published interface standards. I might have done it myself if it had occurred to me to try in fact, I have sometimes wondered why it didn’t occur to me.As for whether it was possible to produce Linux in the amount of time involved it is never wise to assume that genius programmers cannot do something because the incompetent or mediocre cannot. Especially when, as in Linus’s case, the genius already has a clear interface description and a mental model of what he needs to accomplish.
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In your discussion of obfuscation software, I hope it is simple ignorance rather than intentional deceit that prevents you from noting that open-source code has none of the characteristics of obfuscated code, and that obfuscators are therefore irrelevant to the question you are supposedly addressing.Pretty printers do not in fact remove the evidence of copying that is most telling to a programmer that is, use of identical control flow and data structures in circumstances where the second programmer had wide discretion to do things in a different way.
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You claim that “The commercial open source model is [...] depreciating the value of U.S. proprietary software.” This is economically illiterate. What’s being depressed is not the value, but the price the market will bear. As I demonstrated in “The Magic Cauldron”, the value of software as an intermediate good (that is, its value as a productivity multiplier) is uncorrelated with market price.
And so on.
When Raymond shits on your head over your understanding of the history of open-source software it’s like having Stephen Hawking lay a beating on you for trying to tell him that the Inverse Square Law is wrong. At that point you’re so out of your league you should really just avert your gaze, cover your balls, and pray for a swift and merciful death.