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Monday, June 7, 2004 |
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So, I'd been ignoring this whole "Is Torvalds really the father of Linux?" thing sparked by Ken Brown's upcoming Samizdat: Origins and methods of Linux and other hybrid-source software, but I did read Andrew Tannenbaum's notes on his interview by Brown, and I thought it would be only right to read Brown's rebuttal.
What really annoyed me was Brown's attempt to recast Open Source (specifically the GPL, as far as I can tell) as Hybrid Source and BSD and MIT (and others, I suppose) licenses as "True Open Source". What exactly is the GPL a "hybrid" of? How is it not open just because it "can never be true intellectual property?"
What also struck me was that for all of Brown's fear-mongering over the misappropriation of source in the Linux kernel, it is much easier to determine whether such misappropriation occurred in Linux than it would be for closed source. Go look at the source. Everyone is free to. Find the offending code. SCO claims they have. We'll see.
Conversely, how does anyone know what Microsoft, Sun, IBM, SCO, et al. might have taken from others? Given the code borrowing that this article references, I'd be surprised if there weren't snippets throughout various source bases that might be lifted from other copyrighted code. However, you cannot easily review the code to find them. |
Last update: 11/2/04; 6:17:24 PM .
