Ilias Aberkane writes:
p.65 (Forks):
"Other programmers like David Miller, Ted T'so, and ..."
His name is spelled Ts'o — Theodore Y. Ts'o, the ext2/ext3 filesystem
and /dev/random maintainer. The index repeats it slightly differently
as "T'So, Ted, 65" (p.339); both forms should be "Ts'o".
Page 9 (chapter "Battle"):
"Stallman broke away from MIT in 1984 when he founded the Free Software Foundation."
This conflates two different dates. Stallman did leave MIT in January 1984 (to work on GNU, announced September 1983), but the Free Software Foundation was not founded until October 1985 — officially incorporated October 4, 1985.
Sources:
- GNU history (Stallman): "The Free Software Foundation was founded in October 1985, initially to raise funds to help develop GNU." https://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html
- The GNU Project (Stallman): "In January 1984 I quit my job at MIT and began writing GNU software." https://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Software_Foundation (Formation: October 4, 1985)
So the correct sequence: GNU announced Sept 1983, Stallman left MIT Jan 1984, FSF founded Oct 1985.
On page 94,
The quote from Kirk McKusick's history of Berkeley UNIX reads:
"Early in 1977, Joy put together the 'Berkeley Software Distribution.' This first distribution included the Pascal system, and, in an obscure subdirectory of the Pascal source, the editor vi."
In McKusick's original text ("Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix," in Open Sources), the same passage says "the editor ex," not vi. The history backs that up too: 1BSD (1977) shipped ex, while vi only arrived with 2BSD in mid-1978 — which the book itself confirms on the next page, where vi is described as "one of the new tools included in version 2 of BSD."
Around p. 130 in the print edition
The passage on John Ousterhout reads:
"Ousterhout was known for developing a fairly simple but powerful scripting tool known as TCL/Tk. One part of it, the Tool Control Language (TCL), was a straightforward English-like language that made it pretty easy for people to knit together different modules of code."
Tcl stands for "Tool Command Language", not "Tool Control Language". John Ousterhout's own Tcl history page states: "The name Tcl (Tool Command Language) derived from this intended usage." (https://www.tcl.tk/about/history.html). His original paper is likewise titled "Tcl: An Embeddable Command Language" (USENIX Winter 1990).
p.168 (Charity):
"One scientist, Theresa Amabile, told the Globe that
her work 'definitely refutes the notion that creativity can be
operantly conditioned.'" Her first name is Teresa — Teresa M. Amabile
of Harvard Business School, the creativity researcher the Globe piece
was about. The index has the same spelling ("Amabile, Theresa, 168").
chapter 12 ("People"), in the introduction just before section 12.1 "Icons":
"In November 1999, the German government's Federal Ministry of Finance and Technology announced a grant for the GNU Privacy Guard project."
The ministry that funded GnuPG was the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie, BMWi) — "Finance" should be "Economics". Germany's finance ministry (Bundesministerium der Finanzen) is a different body and wasn't involved. In 1999 Werner Koch received a grant of 318,000 DM (about US$170,000) from the BMWi via the German Unix User Group to fund GnuPG development, and GnuPG's own docs list the BMWi as the project sponsor.
Sources:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Koch
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Privacy_Guard
[3] https://github.com/gpg/gnupg/blob/master/gnupg.txt
chapter 15 "Money", page 194:
-- "In 1999, Red Hot merged with Cygnus to 'create an open source powerhouse.'"
That should be Red Hat, not "Red Hot". The book itself gets it right a few
chapters later (p. 250:
- p.194 (chapter "Money"): "They didn't take funding from outside venture
capital firms until 1995." Cygnus's first (and only) VC round actually
came in February 1997 — $6.25M from Greylock Management and August
Capital. Michael Tiemann says so himself in his Open Sources essay ("the
largest private placement for a software company in the first half of
1997"), a 1999 Linux Journal funding table lists "Cygnus $6M Feb 1997
Greylock, August Capital", and Red Hat's own history page records the
same round. So 1995 → 1997.
p.210 (chapter "Fork"):
"Jolitz's series on it in Dr. Dobbs Journal"
is missing the apostrophe — the magazine was "Dr. Dobb's Journal".
The book spells it correctly in two other places (the earlier "I got a
copy of Dr. Dobb's Journal" passage and the Ousterhout bibliography
entry).
Page 274;
"the Bureau of Export Affairs at the Department of Commerce" —
the agency's name was the Bureau of Export Administration (BXA). Its own
September 1999 encryption Q&A and the January 2000 encryption rule in
the Federal Register both read "Bureau of Export Administration,
Commerce." The index repeats the slip on p.327 ("Bureau of Export
Affairs, Department of Commerce, 274").
the "Future" chapter, page 293:
"The man, Jan Johansen, did not write the tool, but merely helped polish and circulate it on the Net."
His first name is Jon, not Jan — Jon Lech Johansen, the Norwegian teenager known as "DVD Jon". The index repeats the slip: "Johansen, Jan, 293-94" (p. 333). Everything else in the passage checks out: Norwegian police did take him in for questioning in January 2000 over DeCSS without formally arresting him, and the anonymous German programmers in the MoRE group really did do much of the core work.
Sources:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Lech_Johansen
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeCSS
On page 312 the entry for GPL reads:
"GPL An abbreviation that stands for 'General Purpose License.'"
That expansion is wrong - GPL stands for the GNU General Public
License. The same wrong expansion appears a few lines up in the "GNU"
entry on the same page ("the C compiler that was protected by
Stallman's GNU General Purpose License").
The main text gets it right ("Richard Stallman's GNU General Public
License"), so it's only the glossary that slips.
The book dates the GNU Manifesto to 1984:
- p. 27: "Richard Stallman wrote his manifesto setting out some of the
precepts in 1984." - p. 33: "he wrote the GNU Manifesto in 1984."
- p. 80: "In 1984, he wrote the GNU Manifesto, which started his GNU
project..." - and the bibliography (p. 322) lists it as "The GNU Manifesto." 1984.
The Manifesto was actually written in 1985 — it was first published in
the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal of Software Tools (Vol. 10,
No. 3, pp. 30-34). The gnu.org copy that your bibliography links to
says the same right at the top: it was "written by Richard Stallman in
1985 to ask for support in developing the GNU operating system",
I'm not so sure about this one, but I'm including it for completeness. If it was published on paper in March 1985, it was almost certainly written in 1984 given the length of time it takes to put together a magazine.
From the Bibliography
- p.317 (Bibliography): The Zack Brown Kernel Traffic entry is dated
"April 13, 1999", but the cited URL is kt19990408_13.html — Kernel
Traffic was a weekly (Thursdays) and issue #13 ran on April 8, 1999.
April 13 was a Tuesday, when no edition appeared; the "13" is the
issue number, not the date. Should be April 8, 1999.
- p.318 (Bibliography): The Alan Cox "Editorial" entry is dated
"July 18, 1999", but the cited URL is
freshmeat.net/news/1998/07/18/900797536.html. Both the path date and
the article ID itself point to 1998 — 900797536 is the Unix timestamp
for July 18, 1998. Should be July 18, 1998.
- p.318 (Bibliography): In the Gilder "Wealth and Poverty" entry the
city is spelled "San Fransisco" — should be "San Francisco" (as it is
in the neighboring entries).
- p.318 (Bibliography): The Cringely "Be Careful What You Wish For"
entry is dated "August 27, 1999", but the cited URL is
pulpit19990826.html — the column ran on Thursday, August 26, 1999
(August 27 was a Friday). Should be August 26, 1999.
- p.318 (Bibliography): Freeman's "Margaret Mead and Samoa" is listed
as Harvard University Press, 1988. The book was published by Harvard
UP in 1983 (WorldCat, Google Books, and the May 1983 review in Science
all give 1983). Should be 1983.
- p.320 (Bibliography): The Mauss entry cites "Gift: The Form and
Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies," trans. W. D. Halls, dated
1950. Two slips in one line: the Halls translation's title is "The
Gift" (missing article), and it was published by W. W. Norton in
1990 — 1950 is the date of the French reprint (Sociologie et
anthropologie, PUF), not of the cited translation.
- p.320 (Bibliography): The Metcalfe InfoWorld column is dated
"June 19, 1999", but the URL slug is 990621 and the piece ran in the
June 21, 1999 issue (June 19 was a Saturday; InfoWorld dates its
issues to Mondays). Should be June 21, 1999.
-- p.320 (bibliography): the 4.4BSD entry lists three editors — "McKusick,
Marshall Kirk, Keith Bostic, and Michael J. Karels" — but "The Design
and Implementation of the 4.4BSD Operating System" (Addison-Wesley,
1996) has four authors; John S. Quarterman is missing. The text has the
same omission on p.45: "the book he wrote with McKusick and Karels in
1996."
- p.321 (Bibliography): Schulman's "Unauthorized Windows 95" is listed
as IDG Books, 1995. The book itself is ©1994 (ISBN 1-56884-169-8;
WorldCat and the Internet Archive scan both show 1994). Should be
1994.
- p.321 (Bibliography): "Searles, Doc. 'It's an Industry.'" — the name
is spelled "Searls" (Doc Searls, the Linux Journal editor). The piece
itself is signed "Doc Searls" (May 21, 1999, matching your date).
- p.322 (Bibliography): The Slind-Flor National Law Journal entry is
dated "March 12, 1999", but the URL slug is e030899q — March 8, 1999.
NLJ is a Monday weekly and March 8, 1999 was a Monday (March 12 was a
Friday). Should be March 8, 1999.
- p.322: your own entry — "Netscape to Release New Browser Engine to
Developers," New York Times, December 7, 1999. The article actually
ran on December 7, 1998. It's still on the Times' archive at
archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/12/cyber/
articles/07netscape.html, dated Monday, December 7, 1998 (the /98/12/
in the URL is a giveaway). The 1999 makes sense as a slip — the book
came out in 2000 — but the piece is from 1998.
- p.322: "Whitenger, Dave. 'Words of a Maddog.'" — should be
"Whitinger". Dave Whitinger co-founded Linux Today (your own
acknowledgments on p. vii spell it correctly: "and Dave Whitinger").
LWN's coverage of the Internet.com acquisition also spells it
Whitinger (lwn.net/1999/1021/commerce.php3).
- p.323: Williams, Riley. "Linux Kernel Vertsion History" — "Vertsion"
should be "Version". That's the actual title of Riley Williams' page
(the URL you cite, kernel.versions.html, and his own LKML posts call
it the "Linux Kernel Version History").
- p.328 (Index): "Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (CETA)" — the
body text on pp. 261-62 correctly spells the acronym "CTEA". ("CETA"
is a different act entirely.)
- p.328 (Index): "Cox, Telsa, 7-8" — she should be indexed as "Gwynne,
Telsa". Your acknowledgments list her as "Telsa Gwynne" (p. viii),
and that's the name she writes under ("The More Accurate Diary");
she never used the Cox surname.
p.333 (Index): "KernelTraffix, 154" — should be "KernelTraffic". The
main text gets it right on p.154 ("Slashdot, Freshmeat, Linux Weekly
News, LinuxWorld, KernelTraffic"), and so does the bibliography
(p.318, the Zack Brown entry).
- p.viii (Acknowledgments): "James Lewis Moss" — his name is one
word, "LewisMoss" (the Debian developer). The book itself gets it
right everywhere else — "James LewisMoss" on p. 68 and pp. 233-34,
and the index entry is "LewisMoss, James" (p. 333).