No doubt you've heard of it by now, although more than likely you've only heard Andy Tanenbaum and others respond to it more than anything else. It's basically the world's largest troll, seasoned with more than a hint of flamebait. In the history of publishing there has never been a less scrupulous work than this book. It's a stinging insult to real books and genuine authors everywhere, harming the credibility of all of us who write for a living.

"From this foul drain pure gold flows forth. Here it is that humanity achieves for itself both perfection and brutalisation, that civilisation produces its wonders, and that civilized man becomes again almost a savage."

That was said in the 1830s about Manchester, England, but we could also say that it applies to the World Wide Web today, with its treasure trove of information and its piles of horrible drivel. I'll give Ken Brown a dollar if he can guess who originally said the above quote (without looking it up).

The last part of Brown's book is the heart of the matter: the one-page public policy recommendation. Ken Brown wants the government to make it harder to use and create GPLed software. He wants the government to do something about the growing use of the Open Source development model in industry by giving more money to the USPTO and to redirect government funding of universities toward "true free source" in cooperation with the IT industry.

So wait a minute -- he spends dozens of pages attacking the GPL and Linus Torvalds and Open Source, and then he wants the government to give money to colleges to fund Open Source development, even going so far as to suggest that corporations that support Open Source programs at universities should be given tax breaks? While it may sound like a paradox, he's actually pulling the old good cop/bad cop trick. He claims that Open Source devalues programs and eliminates due credit for invention. He doesn't seem to understand that GNU's Not Unix, consistently equating all Unix-like operating systems with the original trademarked copyrighted Unix source code. But then he ends the book, by saying how great free (as in price and rights) source code is -- as long as it's "true free source" and that it's only used in an academic environment where no one needs to (or is able to) make any money from it because it's all public domain.

I was curious as to why he brought up university involvement. My questions were answered by Media Transparency, which traces the money trail for media organizations. As you can see here, a series of significant donations come from The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, an ultra-right-wing lobby group based in Milwaukee. What a coincidence that John Norquist, the former mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is on the board of advisors for the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution. So what does this organization do? It gives money to influence public policy, usually to try to return the U.S. to a state of unregulated, laissez-faire capitalism. In this instance the donations are marked specifically, "To support education-reform research and activities." The wording of that phrase seems to be -- like all other things AdTI -- purposefully ambiguous. It could read, "To support education [through] reform, research, and activities," or "To support education reform [through] research and activities," or "To support education [through] research of reform and activities." We can now see why Brown has dragged university support and corporate tax breaks into this mess.

The only common thread throughout the whole book is that he doesn't think Free Software should interfere with proprietary software because that's "real business" and it drives the economy.