SCO shills: de Tocqueville Institute

[Monty J. Harder]

"Brian Kelsay" <BLKELSAY at kcc.usda.gov> wrote:

> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/20/tanenbaum_on_adti_brown/
>
> Tanenbaum almost redeemed himself until the end when he started being a
jerk again.

  I disagree.  I think he's coming from an academic perspective, where there
is a certain way that you provide attribution to the others who explored the
territory you're working in.  Linux exists because Thompson, Ritchie, and
Kernighan built an operating system and programming language on principles
that were pretty radical at the time, and people like Stallman and
Tannenbaum made it accessible after AT&T tried to close it off.  We
sometimes knock RMS for being an extremist, but I think we all respect his
intellectual consistency.  I think AST deserves similar regard.  He may be
an uncompromising SOB, but he sticks to his principles.

  He's come right out and said that Linus did him a favor, taking away all
the people who wanted him try to make Minix do more things.  Minix was never
intended to be a production operating system - it has to be something that
people can learn in one semester.  It uses a microkernel because AST is a
True Believer in microkernels.  He argues that any loss of efficiency caused
by use of a microkernel is roughly equivalent to using last-years' processor
speed, in exchange for a fundamentally more secure design.  His biggest beef
with Linu{s|x} is the use of a monolithic kernel.   While AST remains pure
to microkernel architecture, and RMS to Free-As-In-Freedom software, Linus
is willing to compromise for the sake of efficiency, pulling into kernel
space functions that would in theory be user-land, and requiring patch
submissions via BitKeeper.