Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' of Open Source Code

Last updated
Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' of Open Source Code
AuthorKenneth Brown
CountryUnited States
SubjectLinux kernel

Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' of Open Source Code is a 2004 report by Kenneth Brown. [1] The report suggests that the Linux kernel may have been created or distributed illegally and that open-source software may be generally subject to such abuses.

Contents

The report states that the Linux kernel was written using copied source code from Minix and other resources acquired improperly or possibly illegally by Linus Torvalds. It also suggests that one can never be certain of the origins of open source code, so similar misuse of copyrighted code may exist for other open-source projects. Finally, it asserts that the GNU General Public License is bad for the economy.

The book was greeted with widespread rejection by the technical world and was repudiated by many of its claimed sources.

The prerelease has long been delisted from the distributor's site and the book was never given a proper release, although the prerelease PDF is available online.

Arguments of the book

The title is a reference to samizdat, a form of private circulation of suppressed literature within Soviet-bloc countries, [2] and by extension slang for papers that contain programming techniques and code, sometimes from sources that have not authorized publication, which are often passed from programmer to programmer. [1] Samizdat claims that Linus Torvalds used source code taken from Minix, a small Unix-like operating system used in teaching computer science, to create Linux 0.01, on the theory that no mere student could write an entire Unix-like kernel single-handedly.

The book also recommends that government-funded programming should never be licensed under the GPL, but under the BSD license or similar simple permissive licenses. It states that the US government should: [1]

Reaction to Samizdat

The book's claims, methodology and references have been seriously questioned, including by many of those it quotes in support of its thesis, such as Andrew S. Tanenbaum, author of Minix; Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of Unix; [3] and Richard Stallman, leader of the GNU project. Others have said that quotes attributed as being from an "interview with AdTI" were in fact from prerelease journal papers (Ilkka Tuomi) or from messageboard posts (Charles Mills, Henry Jones).

Alexey Toptygin said he had been commissioned by Brown to find similarities between Minix and Linux 0.01 source code, and found no support for the theory that Minix source code had been used to create Linux; this study is not mentioned in the book. Toptygin has been quoted as saying that he had been asked by a friend

... if I wanted to do some code analysis on a consultancy basis for his boss, Kenneth Brown. I ended up doing about 10 hours of work, comparing early versions of Linux and Minix, looking for copied code. To summarize, my analysis found no evidence whatsoever that any code was copied. When I called him to ask if he had any questions about the analysis methods or results, and to ask if he would like to have it repeated with other source comparison tools, I was in for a bit of a shock. Apparently, Ken was expecting me to find gobs of copied source code. He spent most of the conversation trying to convince me that I must have made a mistake, since it was clearly impossible for one person to write an OS and 'code theft' had to have occurred. [4]

Although Linux 0.01 was written using Minix as an example and starting point – Minix had been created by Tanenbaum as an example for study – no code from Minix was actually used in it; Tanenbaum himself agrees on this point, and stated as much in an interview with Ken Brown while the latter was researching Samizdat. [5] Furthermore, Linux 0.01 was a barely functional first draft, far from the sophisticated, industry-grade Linux-based operating systems it would later grow into.

Samizdat's detractors also point to the fact that AdTI has been funded directly since 1999 by Microsoft, [6] a company which publishes the competing proprietary operating system Microsoft Windows, and considered Linux one of its most important competitors at the time (see Halloween documents § Documents I and II).

After a month of widespread rejection of the book in the technical press, Microsoft also repudiated it in mid-June, a spokesman calling it "an unhelpful distraction from what matters most—providing the best technology for our customers". [7]

Notably absent from Brown's research for Samizdat was any direct communication with Torvalds. [8]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Stapleton, Lisa (May 21, 2004). "Tanenbaum Disputes Methods of Controversial Report". Linux Insider. Retrieved 2 December 2014.
  2. ↑ Borchers, Detlef (20 May 2004). "Von Null auf Linux in 6 Monaten? Nur durch kopierten Code" [From nothing to Linux in six months? Only through copied code]. Heise Online (in German). Retrieved 27 December 2014.
  3. ↑ "Dennis Ritchie's Interview for Samizdat". Groklaw. 1 June 2004. Retrieved 1 January 2015.
  4. ↑ IT Pro. "The real fathers of Linux?". www.itpro.co.uk. Retrieved 2008-06-13.
  5. ↑ Tanenbaum, Andy (May 20, 2004). "Some Notes on the "Who wrote Linux" Kerfuffle, Release 1.5". Archived from the original on September 18, 2010. Retrieved December 13, 2015. I said that to the best of my knowledge, Linus wrote the whole kernel himself, but after it was released, other people began improving the kernel, which was very primitive initially, and adding new software to the system--essentially the same development model as MINIX. ... By the time Linus started, five people or small teams had independently implemented the UNIX kernel or something approximating it, namely, Thompson, Coherent, Holt, Comer, and me. All of this was perfectly legal and nobody stole anything. Given this history, it is pretty hard to make a case that one person can't implement a system of the complexity of Linux, whose original size was about the same as V1.0 of MINIX.
  6. ↑ Tuomi, Ilkka (June 2004). "Evolution of the Linux Credits file: Methodological challenges and reference data for Open Source research". First Monday. 9 (6). Archived from the original on 2004-06-12.
  7. ↑ Gomes, Lee (14 June 2004). "To Judge Recent Attack on Linux's Origins, Consider the Source". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2 January 2015.
  8. ↑ Tanenbaum, Andrew S. (6 June 2004). "Rebuttal to Ken Brown". Archived from the original on 21 January 2024. Retrieved 13 December 2015. BEFORE stating that Brown did not talk to Linus, I asked Linus if Brown had interviewed him. Here is an excerpt from his e-mail to me: AST: Did Brown come visit you? Linus: Nope. I can't even find any emails in my archives, so unless he used some other name or it got marked as spam and deleted, he never even tried to approach me.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew S. Tanenbaum</span> American-Dutch computer scientist (born 1944)

Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum, sometimes referred to by the handle ast, is an American–Dutch computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric S. Raymond</span> American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

Eric Steven Raymond, often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote a guidebook for the Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, published as The New Hacker's Dictionary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linus Torvalds</span> Creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel (born 1969)

Linus Benedict Torvalds is a Finnish-American software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed version control system Git.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Minix</span> Unix-like operating system

MINIX is a Unix-like operating system based on a microkernel architecture. Since version 2.0, it has been Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) compliant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microkernel</span> Kernel that provides fewer services than a traditional kernel

In computer science, a microkernel is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication (IPC).

<i>SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.</i>

SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp., commonly abbreviated as SCO v. IBM, is a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah. The SCO Group asserted that there are legal uncertainties regarding the use of the Linux operating system due to alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM. The lawsuit was filed in 2003, it has lingered on through the bankruptcy of SCO Group and the adverse result in SCO v. Novell, and was reopened for continued litigation by order of a new judge on June 14, 2013. Pursuant to the court order reopening the case, an IBM Motion for Summary Judgment was filed based upon the results of the Novell decision. On December 15, 2014, the judge granted most of IBM's motion, thereby narrowing the scope of the case, which remained open. On March 1, 2016, following a ruling against the last remaining claims, the judge dismissed SCO's suit against IBM with prejudice. SCO filed an appeal later that month. In February 2018, as a result of the appeal and the case being partially remanded to the circuit court, the parties restated their remaining claims and provided a plan to move toward final judgement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU Project</span> Free software project

The GNU Project is a free software, mass collaboration project announced by Richard Stallman on September 27, 1983. Its goal is to give computer users freedom and control in their use of their computers and computing devices by collaboratively developing and publishing software that gives everyone the rights to freely run the software, copy and distribute it, study it, and modify it. GNU software grants these rights in its license.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU/Linux naming controversy</span> Issues of what to call a system with the GNU toolchain and the Linux kernel

Within the free software and the open-source software communities there is controversy over whether to refer to computer operating systems that use a combination of GNU software and the Linux kernel as "GNU/Linux" or "Linux" systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexis de Tocqueville Institution</span> American conservative think tank

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) was a Washington, D.C. based think tank.

In a series of legal disputes between SCO Group and Linux vendors and users, SCO alleged that its license agreements with IBM meant that source code IBM wrote and donated to be incorporated into Linux was added in violation of SCO's contractual rights. Members of the Linux community disagreed with SCO's claims; IBM, Novell, and Red Hat filed claims against SCO.

The Minix file system is the native file system of the Minix operating system. It was written from scratch by Andrew S. Tanenbaum in the 1980s and aimed to replicate the structure of the Unix File System while omitting complex features, and was intended to be a teaching aid. It largely fell out of favour among Linux users by 1994 due to the popularity of other filesystems - most notably ext2 - and its lack of features, including limited partition sizes and filename length limits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate</span> 1990s debate regarding the Linux kernel

The Tanenbaum–Torvalds debate was a written debate between Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds, regarding the Linux kernel and kernel architecture in general. Tanenbaum, the creator of Minix, began the debate in 1992 on the Usenet discussion group comp.os.minix, arguing that microkernels are superior to monolithic kernels and therefore Linux was, even in 1992, obsolete. The debate has sometimes been considered a flame war.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Minix 3</span> Unix-like operating system

Minix 3 is a small, Unix-like operating system. It is published under a BSD-3-Clause license and is a successor project to the earlier versions, Minix 1 and 2.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux</span> Family of Unix-like operating systems

Linux is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution (distro), which includes the kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses and recommends the name "GNU/Linux" to emphasize the use and importance of GNU software in many distributions, causing some controversy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Criticism of Linux</span> Issues concerning use of operating systems which use the Linux kernel

The criticism of Linux focuses on issues concerning use of operating systems which use the Linux kernel.

Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds to create a new free operating system kernel. The resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments, under the GNU General Public License v2 with a syscall exception meaning anything that uses the kernel via system calls are not subject to the GNU GPL.

<i>Operating Systems: Design and Implementation</i> Computer science textbook

Operating Systems: Design and Implementation is a computer science textbook written by Andrew S. Tanenbaum, with help from Albert S. Woodhull. The book describes the principles of operating systems and demonstrates their application in the source code of Tanenbaum's MINIX, a free Unix-like operating system designed for teaching purposes. The publisher is Prentice Hall (1987). The source code for MINIX was included as part of the original 719 pages of text. Later versions of the three editions also included loadable disks with MINIX.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tux (mascot)</span> Mascot of Linux

Tux is a penguin character and the official brand character of the Linux kernel. Originally created as an entry to a Linux logo competition, Tux is the most commonly used icon for Linux, although different Linux distributions depict Tux in various styles. The character is used in many other Linux programs and as a general symbol of Linux.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linux kernel</span> Operating system kernel

The Linux kernel is a free and open-source, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It was originally written in 1991 by Linus Torvalds for his i386-based PC, and it was soon adopted as the kernel for the GNU operating system, which was written to be a free (libre) replacement for Unix.

The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s.

References


This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.