p2pnet.net News:- ‘Ken Brown doesn’t have a clue,’ posted professor Andrew Tanenbaum on Brown’s accusation that Linus Torvalds’ claim to have invented Linux is “probably false“.

Brown is president of the interesting Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. Among other things, one of its ’studies’ concludes that Open Source Software May Offer Target for Terrorists, with Brown as the contact for further inquiries.

On his web page here Tanenbaum publishes an email entitled Comparison of Linux code with MINIX code that he received Alexey Toptygin. which confirms Tanenbaum’s views on Brown.

“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,” says the email, continuing:

“My results are here. To summarize, my analysis found no evidence whatsoever that any code was copied one way or the other. (I realize that Minix predates Linux, but I did the comparison bidirectionally for the sake of objectivity).

“While I was working on this in my spare time, Ken kept pestering me to hurry up and finish. He told me he had a paper awaiting publication, and that my analysis was the last bit of data he needed. I sent the final results (which are, exactly as given to Ken Brown, at the above URL) to him on May 17th.

“When I called him to ask if he had any questions about the analysis methods or results, and to ask if he would like to have it repeated with other source comparison tools, I was in for a bit of a shock. 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; to the best of my knowledge he is talking out of his ass. I apologise for any inconvenience I may have caused you by participating (however indirectly) in Ken’s pet project.

“Please feel free to reproduce this email and the contents of my analysis webpage.

“–Alexey Toptygin”

Enter Richard Stallman
And Richard Stallman has added his weight to the argument, also refuting Brown’s claims.

“In particular, Stallman criticized the report for capitalizing on common confusion between the Linux kernel, which Stallman says “Linus really wrote,” with the full GNU operating system and associated software, which can be and generally is used with the Linux kernel,” says Lisa Stapleton’s LinxInsider report here, going on:

” ‘The actual words I used were quoted correctly, but [author Kenneth Brown] deliberately confuses his terms, like *Linux.* He confuses the Linux kernel, which I had nothing to do with, and the GNU OS project, which I launched,’ said Stallman, who characterized such mistakes as *deliberate.*

“Stallman also said Brown himself misuses words in the report to tarnish both Torvald’s Linux kernel work and Stallman’s own Free Software Foundation (FSF) efforts, such as when Brown alleges Torvalds didn’t ‘invent’ Linux. ‘You don’t *invent* an operating system or a kernel, you write it,’ Stallman told LinuxInsider. ‘Copyright doesn’t cover ideas; it’s your expression of those ideas’.”

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