SCO shills: de Tocqueville Institute

[Brian Kelsay]

Monty J. Harder wrote:
> "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.

You are being very insightful and I must admit, you probably know more 
about Tannenbaum than I.  It's definitely easier to listen to you in 
email at a reasonable volume.  ;-)

I hope Tannenbaum doesn't feel like he was cheated out of  a fortune 
because much of Unix is taught on Linux at Univ. these days.  To me that 
is how he has sounded, but I may be mistaken.  I found it very funny 
that AST defended Linus' work and revealed the incompetence of the 
interviewer.  The guy was obviously fishing for dirt on the creation of 
Linux.

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Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.