At the Alexis de Tocqueville Institute site (I won't link to it - it's distasteful enough that I had to go there myself) there is the disarmingly named "Open source tip of the day", which relates that you can find links to articles to columns by Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal at LinuxToday.com, and suggesting that the links are there because Open-sourcers hate to pay for copyrighted material.
What you will find at LT is abstracted articles with a "complete story" link that takes you to the original article -- hosted on such well known pirate sites as ZDNet and MSNBC (those guys are real revolutionaries).
This piracy is so flagrant that the newest Gomes article linked is from July, 2003. Truly a hotbed of copyright violations. That particular story links you here, to a site that is widely known for its flouting of copyright.
I mean, really, doen't this idiot even understand how the internet works? Or how copyright works, for that matter (see Fair Use).
Ken Brown is the author of the grotesquely misnamed "Samizdat", a work of fiction which postulates an alternative universe in which a character he calls "Linus Torvalds" created an operating system he calls "Linux" by stealing code from other works, mainly works which are supposedly now owned by a fictional company named "SCO". However, this fictional book is so poorly written that any confusion between it and the real world could only be due to stupidity on the reader's part, since the provenance of Linux is one of the best documented in the IT world. Even the real world SCO doesn't claim that Linux was stolen from Unix in its beginning, only since kernel versions after 2.4.
But Brown presses on, claiming that he believes it's impossible that one Finnish grad student could write an operating system as sophisticated as Linux without wide spread stealing of the code. That's on a par with saying that it's impossible that Henry Ford could have built the 2004 Mustang. Subtleties like this are lost on Brown, because he had decided beforehand what this book's conclusion would be, then tried to find quotes to support the conclusion. Hmm, what well known software monopolist likes to buy predetermined outcome research? Oh, yeah, that one. They seem to have put their money on a loser this time though.
Posted on June 11, 2004 02:20 PM