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Tanenbaum Rebuts Ken Brown 651

Posted by michael from the following-a-story-into-the-ground dept.
Stephan Schulz writes "Andrew Tanenbaum has rebutted Ken Brown's reply to his original comments on the (in)famous AdTI report on Linux's origin. It's quite entertaining, and leaves little doubt (well, even less than before) that Brown is conciously twisting the truth. Choice excerpt: 'I'm pretty animated all the time. But I only get tense when people try to put words in my mouth. After half an hour of repeatedly answering the question "Could Linus have written the Linux kernel by himself?" in the affirmative, I was getting a bit irritated. ... People who know me would probably confirm that I do not suffer fools gladly.' I'd add that being called 'the good Professor' repeatedly would have me exploding in no time..."
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Tanenbaum Rebuts Ken Brown More

Tanenbaum Rebuts Ken Brown

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  • Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by the_rajah ( 749499 ) * on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:07PM (#9368402) Homepage
    So I guess this is the rebuttal to the rebuttal of the first rebuttal.. :-) Well done Andrew Tanenbaum!

    Why doesn't KB just cut his losses and slink away before he's made a greater fool of, if that's possible. I suspect that his check has cleared the bank by now.

    "Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain

    • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by captain_craptacular ( 580116 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:13PM (#9368482)
      Why doesn't KB just cut his losses and slink away before he's made a greater fool of, if that's possible.

      Are you kidding? He's trying to sell a book, it's 100% in his best interest to stay in the spotlight as long as possible no matter what that takes. Who's the greater fool, KB with his million dollars in book revenue or the people who laugh at him on /. all day, confident in their superiority.

      • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Informative)

        by peeping_Thomist ( 66678 ) * on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:19PM (#9368535)
        Who's the greater fool, KB with his million dollars in book revenue

        It's being published through a vanity press, not a real publisher.

        • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Informative)

          by julesh ( 229690 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @03:57PM (#9370235)
          From what I can see, it isn't a vanity press (who charge you up-front for the privelege of publishing your book), but they certainly don't seem to be reputable. They do say some things that aren't true in their marketing material, like:

          If I publish with BookSurge, can I still sell my book to a 'traditional publisher' or enter it into contests?

          You still control all the rights to your book. You may effortlessly transition into a traditional publishing deal. We will only need 30 days to remove your files from our system.

          One of the rights that a 'traditional publisher' is likely to be highly interested in is the right to be the first to publish your book. Which you'd no longer be able to give them...

          The Standard Bookseller Discount.
          40% discount. Pre-paid, non-returnable.

          uh-huh? Standard bookseller terms is, I believe 50%. 30 days credit. Sale-or-return.

      • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Informative)

        by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:25PM (#9368599) Journal
        Not true - as mentioned elswhere here and on Groklaw, it's being published by a "vanity" press, which means no huge advances, royalties, or anything. He'll be lucky to break even on the publishing costs.

      • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Maestro4k ( 707634 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:42PM (#9368766) Journal
        • Are you kidding? He's trying to sell a book, it's 100% in his best interest to stay in the spotlight as long as possible no matter what that takes. Who's the greater fool, KB with his million dollars in book revenue or the people who laugh at him on /. all day, confident in their superiority.
        Personally I think KB may turn out to be the bigger fool in the end. We can conspire about why he's so driven to his (repeatedly refuted) belief that Linus couldn't have written Linux without ripping someone else's code off all day, but the fact remains that KB's own consultants have contradicted him! Frankly I would suspect continuing to go to print with such a claim (even though it's his opinions, accusing someone of theft when your own research (e.g. consultants repots) have told you your opinion is wrong will probably not pass freedom of speech muster. KB may find himself on the wrong (and losing) end of a libel suit once his book is published. I doubt he'll have much left from his proceeds even after the legal battle's over, whomever wins.

        Yes I could be wrong, but there is so much out there already refuting, disproving, contradicting everything that we know KB's got in his book so far that I just can't see HOW it couldn't be considered anything but libel when it goes to print at this point. I also hope Linus follows up on it, I'm sure there are plenty of folks willing to help support a Linus vs. KB libel suit out there.

        If KB's really doing this because MS is paying him and/or his institute to do it, I sure hope he got a good price for completely and utterly destroying himself.

        • The best part... (Score:4, Informative)

          by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) <mikemol@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:55PM (#9368913) Homepage Journal
          ...is that his own consultant says he's full of it [cs.vu.nl].

        • Even the mainstream press (Score:5, Informative)

          by CaptainZapp ( 182233 ) * on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:38PM (#9369320) Homepage
          Even one of the two grand old ladies [nzz.ch] of the German speaking press (the other one can be found here [faz.de] stops just an inch short of labeling him a laughable fraud [nzz.ch] (in German) in their last Friday IT and Media section.

          The fishs [altavista.com] translation (which is pretty hillarious in itself) can be found here [altavista.com].

        • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Informative)

          by csbruce ( 39509 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @03:48PM (#9370048)
          We can conspire about why he's so driven to his (repeatedly refuted) belief that Linus couldn't have written Linux without ripping someone else's code off all day, but the fact remains that KB's own consultants have contradicted him!

          I used to be a TA for CS452 Real-Time Programming course at the University of Waterloo. The assignments for that course came in two parts: (1) design and implement your own real-time multitasking kernel, and (2) use it to design and implement a real-time control system for either a robot arm or a model train.

          The students had about a month and a half to complete the first part, which was broken into four assignments. The kernels had a microkernel architecture, but I don't think that really alters the development time that much. (The message passing was highly synchronous, which helps to limit the mind-boggling complexity of debugging a distributed program, which Dr. Tanenbaum doesn't seem to discuss.)

          They worked in teams of two, but when I took the course, my lab partner conked out on me, so I ended writing the kernel myself, but that was okay since I had written multitasking kernels twice before, one in MACHINE LANGUAGE (no, not that wimpy symbolic-assembler stuff!) for a Commodore-128.

          So, it's quite do-able for a motivated student to write a relatively simple kernel in the amount of time that Linus took. Just ask the CS452 students--they had to build their kernels in just six weeks, plus they had other courses and limited resources in the lab.

      • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Lodragandraoidh ( 639696 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:02PM (#9368988) Journal
        Who's the greater fool, KB with his million dollars in book revenue or the people who laugh at him on /. all day, confident in their superiority.

        So, your hypothesis is that the ends justify the means - particularly when money is at stake? A grifter in a suit and tie is still a grifter - regardless of his social standing.

        The sad thing about all of this is that really brilliant people had to take the time to formulate rebuttals to the work of this second rate hack, who's only purpose in life is to serve as the mouthpiece of special interests.

      • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by one4nine4two ( 683126 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @03:45PM (#9369984) Homepage

        Ken Brown should try reading a book, perhaps Just For Fun [amazon.com]. A lot of the unanswered questions that Ken Brown thinks he's raising with Linux are answered in the book. From the best of my recollection...

        I see mentioned a few times that Linus wrote Linux from scratch with no programming experience, but from what I read he was basically raised a programmmer, sitting on his grandpa's lap at his computer as a young boy, watching him program. He started off programming in Assembly I believe, not C.

        Also, Linus claims in the book that Linux started off as a terminal program to read his university email. He began adding various other portions of code to suit his computing needs or rewriting code that he thought could use an improvement (like the disk drivers) and then later on decided to turn them into a complete operating system.

        As far as Linux being based off Minix, Linus had very fundamental disagreements with AST about how operating systems should function, even though Linus had learned a lot about how operating systems work from AST's famous book [amazon.com]. Linus used a monolithic kernel architecture for Linux while Minix uses a microkernel architecture. It's already been proven that Linux doesn't contain code from Minix anyway, so no point in going on about it.

        So this is all Linus' side of the story, but it just seems unlikely that Linus crafted this whole facade some time ago in preparation for something like this. I also think it would probably be worthwhile to include the book in Brown's research on the history of Linux, since the book is about the history of Linux. Brown just seems to have completely ignored it and drawn his own conclusions.

        And to anyone who hasn't read Linus' book yet, I do recommend it. I found it fascinating and I don't even use Linux.

      • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:4, Funny)

        by DoctorPepper ( 92269 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @05:17PM (#9371274)
        Are you kidding? He's trying to sell a book

        Give it six months, it will be on the $1.99 rack at Barnes & Noble. I'll buy a couple of them then to use for emergency toilet paper.

    • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by milgr ( 726027 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:16PM (#9368508)
      As long as KB keeps Tanenbaum responding, he is getting free publicity. Contraversy is frequently used to obtain free press, and boost sales.

      • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Short Circuit ( 52384 ) <mikemol@gmail.com> on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:58PM (#9368944) Homepage Journal
        To bad his consultant [cs.vu.nl] didn't demand a clause in their contract requiring his results [cs.vu.nl] to be included, unedited, in an appendix of KB's book.

    • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Frizzle Fry ( 149026 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:20PM (#9368549) Homepage
      Why doesn't KB just cut his losses and slink away before he's made a greater fool of

      Because there is a world outside of slashdot. Yes, everyone here is going to snicker and roll their eyes about how this guy is obviously an idiot since he questions linus, the gpl, linux, etc., but there are people in the rest of the world who actually will consider what he has to say. Maybe he doesn't care if the crowd here thinks he's a fool? Maybe that's not who he is writing for?

    • Dream On... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:36PM (#9368700) Homepage
      Why doesn't KB just cut his losses and slink away before he's made a greater fool of, if that's possible. I suspect that his check has cleared the bank by now.

      Because, unfortunately, the Suits in Redmond (and elsewhere) have been quite successful in implying/suggesting/insinuating that the likes of Andrew Tanenbaum are nothing more than dirty hippies (and RMS has not been much to help to dispel this view) who don't believe in IP, Ken Brown will keep on looking like an expert to be listened to, and the various PHBs will continue to buy his crap. So, keep on wishing, but the truth is, the more noise people make about Ken Brown, the more believable his bullshit become to Suits and PHBs.

    • Rebuttal to the rebuttal of the rebuttal.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Transient0 ( 175617 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:41PM (#9368749) Homepage
      that's what it is.

      and people might be interested in knowing that there is also a third party critique of the rebuttal to the rebuttal posted over at k5 [kuro5hin.org] with a pretty mature comment tree of its own.

      • Re:Rebuttal to the rebuttal of the rebuttal.. (Score:5, Funny)

        by csbruce ( 39509 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @03:18PM (#9369672)
        From the k5 article (and Tanebaum's site):

        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

        If only Tanenbaum had been a little more clever, there could have been these two extra lines:

        AST: Is K-Mart one of them?
        KB: No.

    • Cutting losses (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:45PM (#9368792) Homepage
      No, I think it's time that *Linus* cuts his losses and slinks away. I mean, seriously, look at what Brown brought to the table this time: "In a recent ZDNet interview(6), he denies having the Lions notes. This is also unbelievable to AdTI."

      It's time that Linus fold. Brown clearly has him by the teeth and isn't going to let go until Linux admits what has been so clearly proven to us. Linus must reveal his theft of code from Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny immediately.

      I suggest that Brown establish a team in cooperation with the United Nations called UNOPUS (United Nations Office for the Prevention of Un-proprietary of Software), with the goal of getting Linus to turn over precisely where he stole his code from. Linus must immediately grant them access to his house at all times, as well as pay their salaries. He must provide an errorless full and complete accounting of his coding activities dating back to the 1980s; any contradictions found should be used as an excuse to sieze his property and jail him.

      His past activities show that we have no reason to trust that Linus's interests are legitimate. His failure to hand over where he stole his code from is further evidence of his guilt; if he would simply hand it over, the penalties would be much less severe. Linus is a threat to our way of life and must be stopped.

      Brown should then, if Linus refuses to state where he stole his code from, Brown should give him a 48 hours ultimatum to hand over the rights of Linux to SCO, or face retribution.

  • This week (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mz6 ( 741941 ) * on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:07PM (#9368408) Journal
    As I have said before... [slashdot.org] Welcome back to this weeks episode!

    Last week we found out that Ken Brown was pregnant with Linus' love child, but this week may hold new meaning to their relationship. Will the relationship last? Or will it crumble to nothing before the masses. And find out who Ken may have been caught cheating with!

    Tune in next week to find out!

  • Tennis anyone? (Score:4, Funny)

    by TimeElf1 ( 781120 ) <kennettb.gmail@com> on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:09PM (#9368433) Homepage Journal
    Anyone think we are watching a tennis match? Back and forth back and forth...

  • Sue? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JohnGrahamCumming ( 684871 ) * <(slashdot) (at) (jgc.org)> on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:10PM (#9368436) Homepage Journal
    At what point do Tanenbaum and Torvalds decide the Brown is slandering or libelling them and actually sue for damages. Reading through Ken Brown's response to Tanenbaum I get the feeling that he's getting close to breaking the law against these two people.

    John.

  • Worse to come (Score:5, Insightful)

    by peeping_Thomist ( 66678 ) * on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:10PM (#9368446)
    Others have made this point, but it's true: there's plenty worse than this to come. There are very powerful forces that are threatened by the development of Linux, and they will fight to the death. Hired character assassins are just the beginning.

    • Re:Worse to come (Score:4, Funny)

      by funkdid ( 780888 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:14PM (#9368492)
      Oooh I wonder if we'll get the standard intern that comes out to say she had an affair with Linus! Maybe we'll get a house guest that claims he bought Crystal Meth for Linus! Maybe some random people will come out and say that he's a communist cocaine using draft dodger.

      Oh wait, all those people are taken, it's a presidential election year here in the US.

      I wonder what OJ Simpson thinks about all this....

    • Re:Worse to come (Score:4, Insightful)

      by funkdid ( 780888 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:17PM (#9368522)
      There are also powerful forces that stand to make some serious money from Linux. I for one am excited for the upcoming firefight, it should be interesting.
    • There are very powerful forces that are threatened by the development of Linux

      ABOUT TUX

      Ballmer: The Open Source is strong with this one

      Gates: The son of Linus must not become a Coder

      Ballmer: He will join us, or die, my master.

    • Re:Worse to come (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tailhook ( 98486 )
      There are very powerful forces that are threatened by the development of Linux, and they will fight to the death. Hired character assassins are just the beginning.

      "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

      - Mahatma Gandhi

      Bring it!

  • Soap (Score:5, Funny)

    by Kid Zero ( 4866 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:11PM (#9368453) Homepage Journal
    ...and people wonder why I don't watch soap operas anymore. Who needs them with stuff like this in real life!

  • Selective Comprehension (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xerph ( 229015 ) <andrewmhunt@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:11PM (#9368458) Homepage
    After half an hour of repeatedly answering the question "Could Linus have written the Linux kernel by himself?" in the affirmative, I was getting a bit irritated.

    Its always been interesting that when somebody (or a group of people) don't want to hear a certain answer, it often goes in one ear and out the other just in time for another "listener" to ask the same basic question phrased slightly differently in hopes of obtaining a reply closer to the desired view. It seems that many times the media in general has this practice almost molded into an art.

    • Re:Selective Comprehension (Score:5, Insightful)

      by csbruce ( 39509 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:33PM (#9368680)
      Its always been interesting that when somebody (or a group of people) don't want to hear a certain answer, it often goes in one ear and out the other just in time for another "listener" to ask the same basic question phrased slightly differently in hopes of obtaining a reply closer to the desired view.

      I really don't understand why he bothered to interview experts. If we assume for one second that Brown isn't a complete idiot, he should have realized that the experts would tell him the truth and then might get a bit uppity when he twisted their words to fit his own agenda. He might also have guessed that they would know how to use that 'inner-net thingy'.

      Really, he should have interviewed 'experts' like Rob Enderle or Laura Didio. He wouldn't have had to twist their words and they might have come up with even more creative insults than Brown himself. I guess this a proof by contradiction that Brown is a complete idiot.

  • And AdTI uses ESR comments to shoot at Linus (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gsfprez ( 27403 ) * on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:12PM (#9368462)
    http://www.adti.net/samizdat/open.contradictions.h tml [adti.net] references an ESR quote from Cathedral.

    Of course - i'm not sure they're aware that Minix isn't exactly Solaris-level UNIX that Linux is approaching rapidly...

    Where the idea that the go-cart of Linux 0.1 - which borrowed the ideas of 4 wheels, axles, steering wheel and brakes from Ford cars - is the same thing as stealing Fords from the lot remains to be still explained by AdTI.

    • Re:And AdTI uses ESR comments to shoot at Linus (Score:5, Informative)

      by Shimmer ( 3036 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:44PM (#9368786) Journal
      Here's the damning part of the ESR quote:
      Linus Torvalds, for example, didn't actually try to write Linux from scratch. Instead, he started by reusing code and ideas from Minix, a tiny Unix-like operating system for PC clones. Eventually all the Minix code went away or was completely rewritten -- but while it was there, it provided scaffolding for the infant that would eventually become Linux.
      I think that ESR is simply wrong about this. The analysis of Linux v0.1 (commissioned by AdTI itself) found no code taken from Minix.

      • Re:And AdTI uses ESR comments to shoot at Linus (Score:5, Interesting)

        by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:06PM (#9369021)
        This whole argument over whether Linus could possibly have written Linux reminds me of a quote from Bill Joy [salon.com]
        If I had to rewrite Unix from scratch, I could do it in a summer, easily," says Joy. "And it would be much better. A much, much better job. The ideas are old."
        The article, by the way, is very interesting if you've forgotten or never read it. It's about BSDs legal coming of age, or path to freedom, or whatever you want to call it. By comparison Linux seems almost cleanroom.

      • Re:And AdTI uses ESR comments to shoot at Linus (Score:5, Informative)

        by steveha ( 103154 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:57PM (#9369491) Homepage
        I hope ESR didn't mean to say that Linus lifted actual code from Minix. But it is absolutely true that Linus used Minux as a "scaffolding".

        Linux is now self-hosting: you can use a Linux system to edit Linux sources and compile them. Before Linux was self-hosting, Linus used a Minix host. I don't think the original 0.1 kernel was self-hosting yet.

        steveha

  • Critique of Ken Brown's response (Op-Ed) (Score:5, Informative)

    by anandpur ( 303114 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:12PM (#9368465)
    Critique of Ken Brown's response [kuro5hin.org]

  • Get our own "institution" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:13PM (#9368481) Homepage
    I wonder if the companies that have a stake in Linux like RedHat, IBM, and so forth would be willing to pony up the dough to create our own illustrious-sounding "institution" complete with a European-sounding name that could "create reports and advice to policymakers and government" that would instead be backed by the truth. Or at least the truth as we see it and not the way Micro$oft does.

    I like our truth more, admittedly.

  • For a good laugh... (Score:5, Informative)

    by KJACK98 ( 623902 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:16PM (#9368506)
    For an even funnier laugh, I recommend reading this one Is Brown Really the Father of Samizdat? - A Parody by Justin Moore [groklaw.net] to counter the Fake Research [adti.net], hmm did I mention about their Fake Research [adti.net]?

  • Good professor? (Score:4, Funny)

    by SnappingTurtle ( 688331 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:16PM (#9368515) Homepage
    I'd add that being called 'the good Professor' repeatedly would have me exploding in no time...

    Why, are you a lousy professor?

  • Formatted Article Text (site getting slow) (Score:4, Informative)

    by claar ( 126368 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:18PM (#9368528)
    Rebuttal to Ken Brown

    Introduction

    For those of you just tuning into this soap opera, here is a brief summary of the plot so far. Ken Brown, president of a Washington think tank called the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution [adti.net] has written a book claiming open source using GPL is a bad idea and that Linus Torvalds stole Linux from MINIX, which I wrote. Linus, the alleged stealer, responded [linuxworld.com]. As the alleged stealee I also felt the need to respond [cs.vu.nl]. Now Ken Brown has reacted to my responses [adti.net]. I very much doubt that when he came to visit me, he was expecting me to (1) defend Linus in our interview and then (2) do it fairly publicly later.

    I was planning to spend my Sunday afternoon doing something useful, but since Brown has directly challenged me in his posting cited above, I feel I should respond. I will do this in the form of commenting on his posting. His comments are set off typographically like this:

    "Samizdat is a series of excerpts from an upcoming book on open source and operating systems that will be published later this year. AdTI did not publish Samizdat with the expectation that rabidly pro-Linux developers would embrace it."

    I have to give credit where credit is due. Brown got that one completely right.

    "The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency which contributes to the worldwide effort to protect and govern intellectual property."

    ***EVERY*** country has a patent office. The United States is not unique in this respect. Furthermore, many people think that patenting software is a terrible idea. The subject of software patents [ffii.org]is a very controversial issue in Europe right now.

    "The Samizdat report recommends that the U.S. government should invest $5 billion in research and development efforts that produce true open source products, such as BSD and MIT license-based open source. Government investment in open source development will accelerate innovation."

    I can live with this. Professors are always on the lookout for new sources of research funding.

    "The disturbing reality is that the hybrid source model depends heavily upon sponging talent from U.S. corporations and/or U.S. proprietary software. Much of this questionable borrowing is a) not in the best interest U.S. corporations ..."

    Excuse me? A Finnish student writes some software (in Finland) that a lot of people like and he is accused on sponging off U.S. corporations? And last time I checked, quite a few U.S. Corporations, such as IBM, seemed quite happy with Linux. And a very large number of U.S. corporations seem to be using the (open source) Apache web server. And even if open source weren't in the best interest of U.S. corporations, where is it written that all activities everywhere in the world must be done with the interests of U.S. corporations as their primary goal?

    "Linux is a leprosy; ..."

    This statement is not grammatically, politically, or factually correct. Does he mean "Linus has Hansen's disease" [essortment.com]? I hope not. But if he does, fortunately, it is highly treatable these days. If he means Linux is wasting away, the facts speak otherwise. If he means "Linux is very contagious" this is true, but a better wording could have been chosen.

    "... and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector. Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics

    • Re:Formatted Article Text (site getting slow) (Score:4, Insightful)

      by starm_ ( 573321 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:34PM (#9369277)
      "... and is having a deleterious effect on the U.S. IT industry because it is steadily depreciating the value of the software industry sector. Software is also embedded in hardware, chips, printers and even consumer electronics. Should embedded software become 'free' too, it would be natural to conclude the value of hardware will spiral downward as well."

      I'm afraid to said that Ken Brown is completely right here. I have been lobying for years to ban the use of light bulbs. Light bulb technology and any other electrical light producing devices have been reducing the value of candles for years now. Not just candles have been affected. Because of the low price of "electric" lighting other products are losing value because light bulbs are being used in their manufacturing plants.

      There are deleterious effects on the whole US economy. Products have a lot less value and are available at a very lower price. Costly power lines have been built wasting precious money from the tax payers.

      Please help me stop the light bulbs and all other kinds of electric lighting.

  • Favorite quote from article (Score:5, Funny)

    by SealTit ( 606480 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:22PM (#9368568) Homepage
    "'Linux is a leprosy; ...'

    This statement is not grammatically, politically, or factually correct."

    Is it just me, or does Professor Tanenbaum really seem like the man lately?

  • A Formal "Response" to Ken Brown? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kollivier ( 449524 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:23PM (#9368576)
    I think it's about time everyone got together and created one polished and solid response to Ken Brown's lies and insinuations. We've heard from Andrew Tanenbaum, ESR, RMS, Linus, etc., but what I would like to see is a formal and official response to the AdTI book that is being published, tearing up its insinuations point-for-point, in a way that his own target audience (i.e. "decision makers") couldn't ignore. Particularly, I think it needs to be made clear that even his *own* research on how Minix influenced Linux code showed no code "theft".

    The people that KB is targetting just aren't going to "stay tuned" for the latest back and forth between KB and OSS advocate X. They need to have all the evidence presented to them clearly and concisely, and I think it needs to be from all the major players in the OSS community. I think this will *strongly* discourage people like KB from spouting lies and deception, as they know they will be called on it, at the expense of any journalistic integrity they may have had. And the more obvious it becomes that this is (likely solicited) FUD, the more the whole exercise will backfire on those that hoped to benefit from it.

  • A quote from Brown: (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:25PM (#9368598)
    In his own words:

    "It would be skewed and bias to only quote people that are anti-Linux or anti-open source. I have done this for years..."

  • Better way to settle this (Score:5, Funny)

    by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:27PM (#9368616) Homepage Journal
    Lock Torvalds, Tanenbaum and Brown in a room with 3 bricks, and don't open the door until only one person is left standing.

    And yes, my money would be on Linus. He probably knows that Finnish kung-fu...

  • Writing an OS isn't hard. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:27PM (#9368620)

    Every year at the University of Waterloo the Computer Engineering and Computer Science students personally build their own operating systems (including documentation) in less than four months. This is done without any prior knowledge of how OSes work and without being taught C.

    I'm sure many universities and colleges around the world do the same. Perhaps Ken Brown should investigate them as well.

    http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~ece354/ [uwaterloo.ca]

    http://www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~cs452/ [uwaterloo.ca]

  • US Corporations get on *everybody's* nerves (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:27PM (#9368623) Homepage Journal
    And even if open source weren't in the best interest of U.S. corporations, where is it written that all activities everywhere in the world must be done with the interests of U.S. corporations as their primary goal?

    Agree 100% with him there. For some reason US corporations take it for granted that all countries/entities everywhere exist merely to pander to their interests. To this end, they are fucking not only with the citizens of the US, but with people everywhere.

    The Patent on Basmati rice [flonnet.com] (a US corporation obtained a patent on Basmati Rice, which's been grown in India for thousands of years), and even the war on Iraq [cnn.com] (the Halliburton/Cheney/Iraq_Reconstruction_contract connection) are just a couple of examples of what they're up to.

  • An interesting point... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:30PM (#9368646)
    I can't find the cite, but an interesting point brought up on the discussion of this on K5 is that now Brown has started poking some of the original UNIX implementors like Dennis Ritchie asking them about whether they think Tanenbaum illegally stole from UNIX when he created Minix. It's beginning to look like Brown may be seeing, okay, well if Tanenbaum's not going to play along with my slander, maybe I'll slander him too.

  • Tanenbaum is a good writer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by doombob ( 717921 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:31PM (#9368654) Homepage
    Has anyone else noticed how eloquent and concise Tanenbaum's responses have been? I have many of the books he has written from when I was in school (and I enjoyed them all), but here he seems to take on an amazing writing persona. It's good to see him in top shape. Not to mention that he's so funny. There should be a book written about all of this.

  • Oh, it gets better! (Score:5, Funny)

    by cliveholloway ( 132299 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:31PM (#9368655) Homepage Journal
    Go to the Alexis de Tocqueville [adti.net] home page, then click "Mission" link at top left, then click "Accomplishments".

    I couldn't have summed it up better myself :)

    Oh, I note on their home page that you can submit a study idea to them. How about a study into why Ken Brown is an incompetent researcher?

    cLive ;-)

  • Sure, sure, I think we get it by now (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:36PM (#9368703) Homepage
    The thing that's started to bother me, though: Is Ken Brown just a corrupt shill who is arguing a fallaceous premise in order to make a lot of money for his corporate backers (presumably Microsoft)? Or does he actually believe his own assertions?

    I mean, he sounds quite vehement in his reply to Mr. Tanenbaum. So, I wonder ... when somebody handed him a bunch of money to do his Linux report, what happened, exactly? Did he yawn, scratch his belly and say, "Oh goodie, that'll keep me in spare parts for my Rolls for a while"? Or did he seriously, actually, pop another Paxil, pound his fist on the table and say, "Linux?! Those bastards! By God and all the apostles of Jesus, this is a cause I can get behind!"

    • Re:Sure, sure, I think we get it by now (Score:4, Insightful)

      by MenTaLguY ( 5483 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @03:07PM (#9369588) Homepage

      Is Ken Brown just a corrupt shill who is arguing a fallaceous premise in order to make a lot of money for his corporate backers (presumably Microsoft)? Or does he actually believe his own assertions?

      Probably something of both. I suspect the project was probably pitched to him in terms of whatever principles he normally espoused. I doubt he was particularly knowledgable beforehand; while he may have had nagging doubts, it likely didn't seem too implausible.

      So he takes the money, does the interviews, and somewhere along the way begins to realize how evil a thing he's really been asked to do.

      At that point, he's already got the money, his reputation, and personal pride riding on this. Not to mention an aching conscience.

      Of cousre it would be presumptuous to claim to know what really went on in his head; this is a guess. Regardless, someone in that position can either:

      • 'fess up and recant (which is painful in the short term)
      • lie to themselves and keep going (putting off the inevitable just a little longer)

      Once someone starts down that second road, turning back only becomes more costly. One lie begets another, and the whole vicious cycle begins again, each revolution effecting a further disconnect from reality.

      It's like the moral equivalent of credit card debt.

      That's how we end up with suicidal cult leaders, the Iraqi Information Minister, and Darl McBride.

      Whatever you do, don't laugh, because in small or large ways it happens to all of us. Keep your conscience clean. If there's something you need to make right in your life, do it today, before the long-term costs catch up with you.

  • Mozart the LIAR (Score:3, Funny)

    by ForsakenRegex ( 312284 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:37PM (#9368711) Homepage
    KB has already done the "could not have done it at that age" argument. His next book will instead argue that Mozart was simply small and diminutive, which allowed him to lie about his age to the King of England. He was really 35 at the time.

  • nazis (Score:5, Funny)

    by happyfrogcow ( 708359 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:38PM (#9368720)
    Is anyone else hoping that AdTI mentions Hitler or the Nazis so that this discussion can be officially over?

  • Brown is out of touch (Score:5, Funny)

    by MarkGriz ( 520778 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:41PM (#9368755)
    "The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency ..."

    Is the USPTO is even *nationally* respected any longer?

  • Ph. D vs B.A. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by redphive ( 175243 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:42PM (#9368768) Homepage
    I am not fully aware of Brown's expertise in the subject of OS history and computer science in general, but do you think that Tanenbaum might have an edge in that department?

    From what I read Brown has a B.A in English Literature... WOW, this is so not impressive. Andrew has been a larger part of the CS community and probably has a better idea where the 'any key' is than Kenny does. I find the self-righteous B.A. types to be just that. You will never win an argument with them because they will never be able to ascertain when it is over. I think Andrew deserves a lot of credit for even writing a rebuttal to Ken's comments.

    Ken Brown is serving a personal agenda by writing for the right, and to bolster his own personal exposure with those who he wants to work with/for. Doing some research, Brown's first Open Source article came in June of 2002. 2 years vs a life time... I think the term is 'on crack' when someone thinks they are correct over someone with a lifetime of exposure on the subject.

    Andrew Tanenbaum has been there done that, and probably has more knowledge of what is going on than most people out there. I read a lot of ASTs textbooks, and still have them on my shelf. I think its pretty easy to side with him on this one.

  • Measured Response (Score:5, Informative)

    by geomon ( 78680 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:44PM (#9368782) Homepage Journal
    Many of the recent Slashdot comments regarding the ADTI President Ken Brown's defense [adti.net] of his controversial tome noted that his principle audience was not the Linux community, or even the IT industry. His target audience is the policy-makers in Washington D.C. How is that group informed about issues surrounding open source in general and the Linux kernel specifically? One 'trade' publication, FCW Media Group [fcw.com], "produces information resources that help government IT buyers... form an integrated information system to help them purchase, build and manage technology in government." They are 'our' target audience in defending the concept of software libre, in advancing open protocols and other standards, and in correcting FUD. The May 3rd online issue provides one [fcw.com] such opportunity to advance Linux in government research.

    Nothing stops the flow of FUD like well-positioned information.

  • SCO then Brown...we may need to exaimine OS (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AnimalCoward ( 600737 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:50PM (#9368863)
    I read Browns response to Tanenbaum and he makes a good point. How will open source user's be assured that they won't be pulled into court because of some actual or alleged stolen code?

    I don't think for a second that he even came close to making the case that LINUX is stolen MINUX code. However, Brown's larger point is scary. Given SCO's suite this could be a big hairy monster hanging over opensource for quite some time.

    We in the Open Source community need to face up to the possibility that some of us may be cheating and contributing code that we don't have a legal right to contribute.

    Complain about how Microsoft gets away with stealing code. Complain about SCO having a business plan based on lawsuits. But, we need to think about this: We (the open source community) may be getting off light. There may be a time when someone contributes something that they did not have a right to, when it will be obvious, and when it will be all over the NYT.

    Opensource needs to get an answer to this fast!

  • The Ken Brown-ism that Kills me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by grendelkhan ( 168481 ) <scottricketts@nOSPaM.gmail.com> on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @01:56PM (#9368929) Journal

    "Hybrid source code" is a phrase coined by former Tocqueville Chairman Gregory Fossedal. The term refers to any product with a license that attempts to mix free and proprietary source code at the same time.

    Would this be like taking a free TCP/IP stack [freebsd.org] and mixing it into a proprietary OS? [microsoft.com]

  • The best, most devasting line (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rick Zeman ( 15628 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:00PM (#9368962)
    I don't see why it is plausible for Canadian students to produce 16,000 lines a year but not plausible for Finnish students to produce 10,000 lines a year. It is just as cold in Finland as in Canada so programmers are never tempted to go outside.
  • 10,000 lines ... from the perspective of a writer, is about 400 standard manuscript pages, double spaced.

    I know novelists who can write a 400-pager - from plot idea to submission to their publisher - in under six months. That's with the pages edited, spell checked, and proofread. If you know the goal and have the tools, it's NOT A BIG DEAL!

  • USPTO Internationally Respected? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:05PM (#9369011) Homepage Journal
    From the ADTI link:

    ``The United States is the home of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, an internationally respected agency''

    Ugh! I nearly choked on that! Everyone I know laments the bad decissions taken by the USPTO (provided they have enough knowledge about it). It is not respected by many in the US, let alone internationally, with so many people opposed to US imperialism.

  • wow (Score:5, Insightful)

    by humankind ( 704050 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:12PM (#9369070) Journal
    Torvalds story because the comparisons were too unbelievable. For us to accept Tanenbaum's argument, Linus Torvalds at 21, with one year of C programming, was Doug Comer, an accomplished computer scientist, or smarter than the Coherent team, and of course a better programmer than the good professor too."

    Huh? I learned more in high school from a single computer science teacher than I did in four years of college. Some of my college CSCI professors were the biggest idiots I ever encountered, and easily 5-10 years behind-the-times. I often corrected test questions.

    I am beginning to believe that most of these mean-spirited, burned-out baby boomers blew away a lot of their youth getting wasted or something, and resent anyone who pursued more productive ends. While it might not seem common, young people can be incredibly bright and productive. Linus' accomplishments at that age are actually not atypical IMO, among young people who have decent priorities and focus.

    I was programming for a Fortune 500 company when I was 13 years old. Before I got out of high school I wrote the billing system for a major public utility. Hell, I once got a contract to write a book on C programming for the web and at the time, I actually had about a month's worth of C programming, and none of it was web-related. I ended up taking a "crash course" in programming and writing that portion of the book within a few months and it still holds up today. When I was younger, I did a lot of computer consulting and I'd often accept teaching/consulting gigs on subjects I was unfamiliar with, but I'd bone up the night before and pull it off with nobody being the wiser. 10,000+ lines of code in a year? Try 10,000 lines of code in a few days.

    It really bothers me when people who don't have faith in their own abilities suggest others, such as Linus, are incapable of operating beyond the boundaries of their own mundane self-expectations.

  • Homework in my undergad compiler class (Score:5, Informative)

    by Get Behind the Mule ( 61986 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:22PM (#9369147)
    My undergraduate compiler class had only one homework assignment: write a compiler by the end of the semester. That gave us four months time. We got the grammar for an Algol-like language to be compiled, which was relatively standard and simple (but it did have runtime allocation of arrays, IIRC). And the work was spaced out over the course of the semester -- first we did the lexer, then the parser, then the code generator. But that was basically it, you got four months, go write the compiler or flunk, chump. (We had to write it in C.)

    Not an easy assignment by any stretch, but we all got it done. I was an undergrad junior at the time, and there were juniors, seniors and grad students in the class as well. Don't ask me about the sleepless nights during the last week before the due date, I still remember it all too well.

    Writing an OS is even harder than writing a compiler by an order of magnitude, and getting that done within a year may very well be too much for your average undergrad. But it's not the kind of thing that a young programmer couldn't possibly do if he's talented, hard-working and has a little experience. Ken Brown's suggestion that it just can't possibly be, which is a weak argument in any case, has no force at all.

  • AdTI logic (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ken Brown ( 786167 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:22PM (#9369150) Homepage
    Linux 0.1 was totally different to Minix. Everyone I interviewed said Linus wrote Linux 0.1 himself. But Microsoft is paying me a lot of money to say otherwise. I love money, and don't care what I have to do to get it. Microsoft even gave me a copy of the same script Darl McBride is using. It's a literary masterpiece, and totally not derived from any other work ever. Look for the AdTI Review of Books, coming out soon. P.S. Anyone else notice how I didn't accuse Dennis Ritchie of remembering anything about Multics when he worked on Unix? That's because a friend of a friend of mine owns UNIX, and they would be upset if I slandered its provenance.

  • 10,000 lines of code in a year (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LWATCDR ( 28044 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:24PM (#9369167) Homepage Journal
    I was shocked to see that Linux 0.1 was only around 10,000 lines of code. Could one programmer write that! You bet they could. I have wrote a 14,000 line application in less than three months. Linux could have easily written the kernel in a year. So what if he was only 21? That just means that he is right out of or close to being out of school and hopfuly full of the latest and greatest ideas. I hate to say this because I hate RMS's GNU/LINUX rants but the truth is Linus wrote the kernel he did not have to write all the untilities or the compiler. Those came from the GNU project.

  • Torvalds is a Composer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by catdevnull ( 531283 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:44PM (#9369381)
    Torvald's early kernels were very small and not extensive (and not too stable either). From the beginning, he's invited (publicly) the hacker community to contribute. The kernel grew and it became an open source project from the beginning. The organic growth of the kernel came from lots of people and was MANAGED by one person. Alot of the ground work had already been done by MINIX so, as a "novice programmer," Linus didn't have to re-invent the wheel-he used the structure of MINIX as a template and hacked it from there.

    It's like a composer using the sonata form--the notes are different but the form is the form.

    To extend the metaphor, the form has actually grown from simple tune to a full symphonic work as the motif began to grow and other musicians' contributed with different textures, sounds, and rhythms.

    Aaron Copland's "Apalachian Spring" features an old "Shaker" tune called "The Gift To Be Simple." Copland didn't write the tune, but he did adapt the work into a larger polyphonic structure with variations and formal development. (It was a ballet score for a small ensemble then a full symphonic suite).

    I suggest that Linus took Minix and did the same. Only Linus's symphony contains a bit of jazz improv by the use of extemporaneous solos from the contributing musicians in his orchestra under the baton of the conductor/composer.

    I fail to see why Ken Brown feels a need to call out Linus as some sort of phoney. Maybe he can write about how Copland ripped off all those poor backward hillbillies in the Apalachians.

  • A number of fallacies (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alex_tibbles ( 754541 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @02:56PM (#9369483) Journal
    1. Linux 0.1 == Linux 2.6
    2. Minix is a "Prentice Hall Product".
    3. "Hybrid Source".
    4. Software being cheaper is bad for the economy.
    5. Proprietary software is immune to the problem of software attribution.
    6. Rhetoric constitutes an argument.

    1. This fallacy is used in the inference that since Coherent took several man years, Linux must have been stolen.
    2. As even Brown admits, Prentice Hall released Minix under a libre license.
    3. Perhaps "Noone can ever truly accrue any value from owning hybrid source software", but so what? Everyone can accrue value from such software. It is a rank non-sequitur to claim that "The hybrid source model negatively impacts ... inevitably the entire IT economy". (See 4 too).

    "Tanenbaum vehemently insists that Torvalds wrote Linux from scratch, which means from a blank computer screen to most people. No books, no resources, no notes -- certainly not a line of source code to borrow from, or to be tempted to borrow from."
    This guy has never written a line of code in his life, and it's painfully obvious. I cannot think of a single program that I have written where I have never used a book. Linus just typed in every line of Linux version 0.1 himself. That's what "from scratch" means.

  • little does he know ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by looie ( 9995 ) <michael@trollope.org> on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @03:05PM (#9369563) Homepage
    just for laughs, i checked out the adti web site and lo ... it's hosted by geocities! which is owned/operated by yahoo! which runs on freebsd ... hmm, i wonder what web server they're using.

    c:\src\perl>geturl -h -d http://www.adti.net
    HTTP/1.1 302 Found
    Date: Tue, 08 Jun 2004 19:56:02 GMT
    Location: http://geocities.yahoo.com
    Connection: close
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

    what a hoot. a guy using a web hosting service from one of the biggest users of open source to distribute broadsides condemning open source.

    mp

  • I don't believe Ken Brown wrote that book (Score:5, Funny)

    by kasperd ( 592156 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @03:10PM (#9369616) Homepage Journal
    One man couldn't possibly write so much crap in such a short time. I'm sure parts of it must be written by somebody else, and included in the Brown Book with or without permissions.

  • Late to the game, read if you can... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GPLDAN ( 732269 ) on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @04:38PM (#9370875)
    One thing that sort of pisses me off about Slashdot is that if you take time to read everything, and form a response - it's so far down that it probably doesn't get read.

    I read - completely - Brown's webpage. Purple text gives you a headache. I then read Ta bu shi da yu's response on kuro5shin.

    Andrew tannenbaum sums it up when he comments on his webpage about Brown's visit. Here was a guy (Brown) who clearly didn't understand patents, or how to sumbit patent applications or release them into the public domain. He didn't understand tenets of intellectual property law. His paper is full of deliberate misuse of terms . tannenbaum says he wasn't very sharp, and he was being nice.

    The guy, Brown, comes to visit him and Tannenbaum asks him outright who funds this "thinktank". He dodges the question. Andrew asks - OUTRIGHT - is it Microsoft? Of course, he knows it is. The guy won't answer. Brown then starts down a series of questions that shows he hasn't done ANY research into the history of UNIX. None! He doesn't know about the AT&T vs. BSD lawsuit? To the lawyers out there, this is tantamount to going before the Supreme Court to argue a racial discrimination suit and not knowing what Brown vs. Board of Education was about. It's that stupid.

    It's clear that Andrew quickly sizes this guy up as a moron, and tries to educate him. Brown will have none of it, diverting the questioning into a series of leading questions.

    It's pretty sickening. Andrew Tannenbaum is a super bright man. His book, "Computer networks, Fourth Edition." is the BIBLE for network professionals. It is to networking what Kernigan and Richie's book is to C programming. Actually, that's not right. K&R is a primer, nothing more. AT's book is the definitive history of how we got to where we are.

    It genuinely sickens me when little turds like Brown get a few bucks from some Microsoft frontman, and then set off on a smear job like this. What it says, ultimately, is that Microsoft is afraid. I chalked that up to Slashdot hype and wishful thinking, but stuff like this makes me re-think that position. MySQL and PostgresSQL are beginning to really cut not into Oracle, but into SQLServer. Sun has been bought off, but IBM is coming hard with Linux and clustering. The Dell's and HPs out there are putting together bigger deals doing Linux. It's pissing Microsoft off, where before I honestly believed they didn't care. They ignored it.

    I guess we should all be happy that guys like Tannenbaum exist, and that they choose teaching and University as their vocation. They are the counter-balance to the mass of hysterical bullshit. They will live to document this era correctly for the next few generations. Sorry to be so melodramatic, but it's basically true. In 100 years, whatever happens, people need to know how it went down. It didn't matter when crooks like Jack Tramiel decide to bust out companies for their personal fortunes and change the face of personal computing (sorry, still bitter over the Amiga all these years later). But the stakes are 1000x larger now.

  • AdTI asking for $60,000 for media campaign (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 08, 2004 @04:57PM (#9371097)
    AdTI here [pmdocs.com] demanding $60,000 from lawyers of Philip Morris to start a media campaign.

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