Ken Brown bologna

[WayStar]

This guy is really getting my blood pressure up.

http://www.adti.net/samizdat/brown.reply.june.04.html

He speaks with the kind of mouth-foaming zealotry of which Linux users are often portrayed as exhibiting. Yet he states his goal clearly. His aim is to influence U.S. Government decision makers.

I am concerned, because I don't have enough money to influence my representatives the way that a business-funded FUD "report" can. Will lawmakers get online to read the reports of those supposedly interviewed? Probably not.

What can be done? If we ignore him, we lose. Lawmakers will accept what he writes as fact. If we protest, then we are rabidly pro-Linux wackos, and lawmakers will accept what he writes as fact.

We all know that life isn't fair, but there has to be some way to reduce the impact of these types of lies. Any ideas?

-Waylena

[klackenfus]

Who is this guy? I hate to be stupid but he is obviously a partisan against the Linux Movement. Does he have any clout or is he just a journalistic hack? All I know is, he has the same name as a TV weatherguy in Memphis, TN.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I heard about this, I think he has already been discredited.

[hard candy]

If you read some of the publications and links (the ones that lead somewhere) the site and institution have the flavor of the conservative right wing. Perhaps they are trying to protect big business. They and the people who support them are scared to death of the Linux/Gnu model since it threatens some big software companies.
Right now Linux is at a threshold, kind of poised on the brink of becoming really bigtime in the IT world.
So some of the big software (and some hardware) companies are fighting against Gnu/linux..
I'm an optimist and believe linux is such a grassroots phenonmenum that it will prevail. But there will be a fight. Just keep telling folks about linux, that is the way to eventually keep Linux growing.

[JohnT]

I don't even have to get past the "Copyright © Alexis de Tocqueville Institution" line in the header to know this an extreme left-wing soap-box diva.
:D :D...BTW..look at some of the links at the very bottom of the page.

[bwkaz]

I especially like these parts of his interview with Andrew Tanenbaum:

AST: "What's the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution?"
KB: We do public policy work
AST: A think tank, like the Rand Corporation?
KB: Sort of
AST: What does it do?
KB: Issue reports and books
AST: Who funds it?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is SCO one of them? Is this about the SCO lawsuit?
KB: We have multiple funding sources
AST: Is Microsoft one of them?
KB: We have multiple funding sources and:

I started to tell him the history, but he stopped me and said he was more interested in the legal aspects. I said: "Oh you mean about Dennis Ritchie's patent number 4135240 on the setuid bit?" Then I added:"That's not a problem. Bell Labs dedicated the patent." That's when I discovered that (1) he had never heard of the patent, (2) did not know what it meant to dedicate a patent (i.e., put it in the public domain), and (3) really did not know a thing about intellectual property law. He was confused about patents, copyrights, and trademarks. <note from bwkaz: so are a LOT of other people...> Gratuitously, I asked if he was a lawyer, but it was obvious he was not and he admitted it. At this point I was still thinking he might be a spy from SCO, but if he was, SCO was not getting its money's worth. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/

[robagen]

"Left-wing Diva", John T. ???
Who? Ken Brown?
He sounds more like a "paid parasite of the Corporate Right", to me.
His complaints, copyright AdtI,etc.,are yet another attack on the GPL
--hidden via "concerns" about the originality of the Linux Kernel.

[JohnT]

Originally posted by robagen
"Left-wing Diva", John T. ???
Who? Ken Brown?
He sounds more like a "paid parasite of the Corporate Right", to me.
His complaints, copyright AdtI,etc.,are yet another attack on the GPL
--hidden via "concerns" about the originality of the Linux Kernel. Last I looked the right was pro-democratic, not exactly anti-GPL, but who am I to say.:p

[XavierP]

FWIW,(and you all probably know this), Groklaw (www.groklaw.net) has covered and ripped apart Ken Brown's words in some detail. And very entertaining it is too.

That'll learn him!
:D

[WayStar]

It's true, on groklaw and on Tanenbaum's site, Ken Brown's impending report is being torn to shreds.

What worries me is that government officials only seem listen to "reason" when it's sponsored by powerful business interests.

Grrr.

-Waylena

[dboyer]

I always tell myself not to be so quick to judge that anti-linux people arn't right/or arn't onto something.

I think, c'mon, certainly from the other side of the fence, Tanenbaum's writing must also look rediculous.

Then I think...

No. Can't be.

When the author of Minix says "no." and his researchers say "no" and when other situations of people writing code come into light (I believe some school in Onterio wrote a slightly larger kernel (in code per person) in a similiar amount of time), I can't believe that he can truely be taken seriously.

But then again, I said the same thing about a few Litigious Bastards (www.sco.com) we all know so well, and look how thats turning out...

Just for fun, go to http://www.adti.net/ , go Mission (upper left) then go to "Accomplishments"...

Yeah, that sounds about right.

[robagen]

The whole tone of Brown's replies to Tannenbaums's questions..evasive, evasive,
like he's got something to hide. Agendas.
At least the Heritage Foundation comes right
out, as it were, and says what it says, and that's
it, but this AdtI bunch..it's like they hope to
get the Linux community's blood pressure up.
Or..you could get T-shirts made, or something,
saying, YES, KEN, Linus is THAT good.:p :p