[FYI] 'Not the sharpest of knives' - praise heaped on Linux study author By John Lettice

["Axel H Horns" <axel.h.horns@gmx.net>]

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/20/tanenbaum_on_adti_brown/>

'Not the sharpest of knives' - praise heaped on Linux study author By 
John Lettice  

Published Thursday 20th May 2004 17:11 GMT  

Previous suggestions that the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution would 
be publishing excerpts from its damning indictment of Linus Torvalds 
today would appear to be inoperative. According to the AdTI front 
page free copies are available for "Tocqueville supporters only", the 
study will be available for purchase from around 20:00 GMT today, and 
free review copies can be obtained by working press and academics 
"(copyright agreement required)".  

That last bit will have an obvious effect on a pretty large number of 
people who might be expected to take some issue with the opus, but 
considering how slick the rest of the AdTI marketing operation has 
been, we feel sure this was entirely unintentional. The AdTI first 
published a press release implying great things from a forthcoming 
work from Institution president Kenneth Brown. It was however couched 
in sufficiently weasel terms for one to deduce that the final work 
would not actually claim flat-out that Linus Torvalds is a liar. 
Subsequent claims along the lines of there being "a high probability 
that Linux is a derivative work" (Gregory Fossedal of AdTI to 
Newsfactor) seem to support this view. Newsletter  

The release trailed a study by Brown challenging Torvalds "claim to 
be the inventor of Linux", said that it was part of a forthcoming 
book on open source software, and that excerpts from the book would 
be published at adti.net today. Shortly after the publication of the 
release, the AdTI site fell over. Brown tells CNET that 'outsiders' 
have crashed his web site twice in recent days, however The 
Register's observations of said crashed site led us to believe that 
it was merely the site of an outfit which had not bought enough 
bandwidth to cope with the amount of publicity it had actively 
solicited. But Brown's right - there really is a shocking number of 
outsiders on the internet these days, and there should be a law 
against it.  


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