Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' of Open Source Code

Samizdat is a 2004 published work on the topic of open source. Author Kenneth Brown, president of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution ( ADTI ), a politically conservative -oriented think tanks. It appeared not print, but available on the Internet for download. It is alleged among other things that Linus Torvalds in 1991 the first kernel of Linux could not possibly have written alone, but rather have copied from Minix, without naming this system as the source.

Criticism

The work was criticized by open-source developers and representatives of the affected software as unscientific. Several of Brown as sources specified persons, including FSF president Richard Stallman and Unix developer Dennis Ritchie, stated to have been misrepresented or misunderstood. Eric S. Raymond called the work a "disaster ". Andrew Tanenbaum, author of Minix, published a detailed commentary in which he rejects Brown's claims as untenable. Tanenbaum quoted, among others, a study commissioned by Brown, who had found no striking similarities in the source code of Linux, and Minix, but is not mentioned in the book. According to one online magazine the study's author was asked by a friend, " if I was interested in a little code analysis for his employer, Kenny Brown perform. So it was that I spent about ten hours, early Linux versions with Minix to Compare to make copied from Minix code identifying to sum it up: .. my analysis was absolutely no indication that code was taken when I [ Kenneth Brown] called to ask if he still questions regarding the analysis method or the results used would and if he wants that the analysis will be repeated with other tools, to expect a nasty surprise. Apparently expected Ken that I would find a whole heap copied source code. the majority of the conversation was spent trying to convince me that I must have made ​​a mistake somewhere, because it 's obvious that a single person could not possibly write an operating system and Codeklau must have taken place. "

Tanenbaum expressed, among others, the suspicion that the purpose of publishing it was from the outset to put Linux and open source in a bad light. In fact, it was announced that the ADTI funding from Microsoft had accepted, a company that Linux as a threat and fight it seeks (see Halloween documents).