| #03 |
Intelligent comment department
from our message boards...
"Did Linus use Minix code in his original pass? I do not know, you do not know, AST does not know, ESR does not know - the only person who really knows is Linus Torvalds."
tg@redblufftech.com
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"There is only one real 'expert' in this discussion -- Linus Torvalds. This is all about Mr. Torvalds's credibility, which, I think, is why there's so much mutual frustration." AdTI co-founder Gregory Fossedal
emeritus@adti.net
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| #02 |
"Linus Torvalds and his peers who oversee popular open source projects accept contributions from any and all sources based on the merits of the code alone. They don't have the institutional resources to ensure that a programmer isn't guilty of plagiarism."
Wired magazine, November 2003
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"Wired magazine is hardly a source of technical information, since they self-admitedly serve to only focus on the social aspects of technology, and have no staff writers with any experience in OS or kernel development, but you already knew that." -- hopeless@pacifier.com |
| #01 |
"GOOD PROGRAMMERS KNOW WHAT TO WRITE.
GREAT PROGRAMMERS KNOW WHAT TO REWRITE (AND REUSE)
"While I don't claim to be a great programmer, I try to imitate one. An important trait of the great ones is constructive laziness. They know that you get an A not for effort but for results, and that it's almost always easier to start from a good partial solution than from nothing at all.
"Linus Torvalds, for example, didn't actually try to write Linux from scratch. Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like operating system for PC clones. Eventually all the Minix code went away or was completely rewritten -- but while it was there, it provided scaffolding for the infant that would eventually become Linux....
"The source-sharing tradition of the Unix world has always been friendly to code reuse (this is why the GNU project chose Unix as a base operating system, in spite of serious reservations of the system itself)."
Eric Raymond
The Cathedral & the Bazaar
1999, p. 33
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Webmaster's note: Mr. Raymond has posted a reply on Mr. Brown's "Samizdat" study, and may do so regarding AdTI's use of the quotation nearby. We will post his comments, or link to them, here, if appropriate.
Other excerpts:
"Just because Raymond says that Torvalds used Minix as a scaffolding, it does not mean that that's what happened. Raymond is an idiot...."
arnold@mailinator.com
"To write Linux, Minix was used as the "development environment", a technical term that could be equated to "Windows and Word" in the case of writing a book. When references are made to "parts of Minix" it is the parts necessary to manage the source files and run the editor and compiler to compile those independant source files into Linux. As Linux matured, the development environment was moved entirely onto a Linux system, after which point all work on Linux was done without the aid of Minix. Note that this does not violate the copyright of Minix, because the source code of Minix was not incorporated into Linux, but only Minix itself in the compiled form was used as a tool for editing and compiling software. The compiler had no license restrictions on its use, and neither did Minix on anything created with it. Note that it is different to create something WITH a tool, and to create something FROM a tool."
blivengood@gci.net
"Mr. Raymond did not participate in the early development of Linux. You have already spoken with the principals of both Minix and Linux, yet you place this quotation from Raymond on your page. How does Raymond being wrong about the facts of the Linux development support your thesis?"
brukster@yahoo.com
"Oh, please. Eric Raymond didn't write Linux himself, and it's AWFULLY easy for him to have made a factual error in his writings."
John.Luke@bmwna.com
Editor's note: With all due respect to the correspondents above, the following endorsement appears on the inner-front jacket of the Raymond's book: " 'This is how we did it.' -- Linus Torvalds." Raymonds is well known, or was, among open-source circles as a close friend of Torvalds and, more or less, the chronicler of record for Linux. Prior to posting the above quotation on the AdTI web site, interestingly, we recieved numerous emails from persons advising us to "just read the Eric Raymond book." So we did.
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