[FYI] 'Not the sharpest of knives' - praise heaped on Linux study author By John Lettice
<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/20/tanenbaum_on_adti_brown/>
'Not the sharpest of knives' - praise heaped on Linux study author By
John Lettice
Published Thursday 20th May 2004 17:11 GMT
Previous suggestions that the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution would
be publishing excerpts from its damning indictment of Linus Torvalds
today would appear to be inoperative. According to the AdTI front
page free copies are available for "Tocqueville supporters only", the
study will be available for purchase from around 20:00 GMT today, and
free review copies can be obtained by working press and academics
"(copyright agreement required)".
That last bit will have an obvious effect on a pretty large number of
people who might be expected to take some issue with the opus, but
considering how slick the rest of the AdTI marketing operation has
been, we feel sure this was entirely unintentional. The AdTI first
published a press release implying great things from a forthcoming
work from Institution president Kenneth Brown. It was however couched
in sufficiently weasel terms for one to deduce that the final work
would not actually claim flat-out that Linus Torvalds is a liar.
Subsequent claims along the lines of there being "a high probability
that Linux is a derivative work" (Gregory Fossedal of AdTI to
Newsfactor) seem to support this view. Newsletter
The release trailed a study by Brown challenging Torvalds "claim to
be the inventor of Linux", said that it was part of a forthcoming
book on open source software, and that excerpts from the book would
be published at adti.net today. Shortly after the publication of the
release, the AdTI site fell over. Brown tells CNET that 'outsiders'
have crashed his web site twice in recent days, however The
Register's observations of said crashed site led us to believe that
it was merely the site of an outfit which had not bought enough
bandwidth to cope with the amount of publicity it had actively
solicited. But Brown's right - there really is a shocking number of
outsiders on the internet these days, and there should be a law
against it.
[...]
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