What Linus _should_ do is write a well-thought-out rebuttal and get it into the major news outlets to let everyone know how ridiculous these claims are.

I don't think Linus should bother. As it is, everyone who matters can see how ridiculous that is. If Linus places a rebuttal in major news outlets, it'll give credibility to these people (or at least more public controversy, as they will post a response themselves, then Linus will have to reply, and this will continue to go on fueling publicity for Brown's book). They WANT people to take them seriously and reply. They're powerless if we don't.

Really...I'd just rather see Linus's usual witty replies in a board somewhere, definitely not in a major news outlet. It won't give them fuel to their campaign and I'll be able to laugh, perhaps as much as I laughed after reading their press release.


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um.. DOS was written from scratch by Tim Paterson. it was originally called qdos, which stood for "Quick and Dirty Operating System." MS bought the rights to it and renamed it MS-DOS. It looks similiar to cp/m but its an entirely different OS. look here http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Micronews/paterson 04_10_98.htm

I think that is entirely the point. Linux was also written from scratch[1] but based upon UNIX design and philosophy[2]. It (Linux) looks similar to UNIX but it's an entirely different OS.

The analogy is entirely apt. Microsoft got its big break by selling a CP/M knockoff. Linux is a UNIX knockoff. So what? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Perhaps somebody should release a whitepaper: "Bill Gates is not the father of MS-DOS". Could equally well follow that up with "Bill Gates is not the father of MS-Windows".

[1] Pedant Points: Linus says that the early (never distributed) versions of Linux contained Minix code but all that code was removed before the first ever public release.

[2] More Pedant Points: Some people might say Linux was based on Minix design, but Linus early on said he wanted to follow POSIX specs. So Linux is more correctly a POSIX wannabe.