Talk:Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' of Open Source Code

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This article was nominated for deletion on 8 December 2014 (UTC). The result of the discussion was keep.

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Samizdat -- hilariously poor choice of title

As the article points out, Samizdat was a Russian term referring to the clandestine distribution of literature to circumvent political censorship. It seems to me that that was a Good Thing. If the author of this book meant to associate GPL'd open source programs with samizdat, then more power to him! Solemnavalanche (talk) 18:05, 4 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Additional Information

I was working as a salesman in those days, covering major accounts, and was often in Washington. I phoned Ken Brown ahead of my next trip to Washington to try and arrange a meeting. The conversation went well until I mentioned what I wanted to talk about. All of a sudden he couldn't meet with me. We did trade some further emails, which I no longer have, as I used my work account, and I'm no longer there.

A while after this I was playing with their website. While they squawked about the GPL, I found that their site included a hidden Bulletin Board using the PHPBB software, which is licensed under the GPL. One of their staffers (can't remember who) had set it up, made one post, and left it running. It allowed auto-signons so I made myself an account, and dropped in every once in a while to see if they were doing anything with it. No one ever noticed that I'd signed up, and posted a message.

About a year or two later the spambots found the bulletin board, which was relatively unprotected, at least by today's standards. They signed up in droves leaving messages about Viagra, fake Rolexs, and all the usual stuff. This went on for about another year, and then the Board software crashed.

During the entire time, the ADTI website was up. While updates were sporadic, they did happen. It was an interesting meltdown. UrbanTerrorist (talk) 14:09, 15 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

External links section

This section needs to be substantially trimmed. Nowhere else on Wikipedia have I ever seen so many external links, and such a large proportion that are critical. It's contributing to the bias in this article, which overall read like an attack page when I arrived. Champaign Supernova (talk) 18:17, 1 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You can tell this is a rather old article ... That is actually what the coverage looked like. The book was pretty much reviled. But it did get enough press coverage to be notable. And yes, all that stuff definitely needs folding in. I'll have a hack at folding it in this week - David Gerard (talk) 00:21, 2 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Old doesn't need to mean biased. I'm having trouble seeing how this article's topic meets Wikipedia's notability criteria. It appears the topic of this article is an article, not a book, and that it wasn't actually ever officially published. I'm not finding substantial coverage in reliable sources. Many of the external links listed appear to be to small tech-related blogs, or even to emails. Of the two inline citations, one is to Linux Insider, which I'm not sure meets WP:RS. The other source doesn't mention the Samizdat report by name, but seems to reference it. It also says "Yet Brown's claims were leant credibility by broad coverage in the computer press." That assertion would appear to disprove the statement that the article was "universally repudiated." In any event, the current sourcing doesn't sufficiently establish notability. Champaign Supernova (talk) 19:36, 2 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

After the AfD I made a start on converting some of the sources from external links to inline. I think the external links that don't directly support statements in the text could be trimmed. Maybe keep Tanenbaum in a section by himself, since he wrote about it so much. I also thought that Champaign Supernova had a point about POV language, so I toned that down a bit. The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is also old and needs to be cleaned up. No point in duplicating all of this material there. – Margin1522 (talk) 20:31, 1 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Notability is connected to SCO. You have to put that 'book' in the context of SCO's attempt to capture Unix and tie Linux to it. If it had not been for the SCO lawsuit, sure that stuff would not have been noticed, and not even written to start with. But the Microsoft-backed SCO lawsuit existed, and the PR campaign around it existed, and this is a piece of it Shmget (talk) 03:59, 27 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Neutrality dispute

What countervailing sources are there to support the claim of non-neutrality? - David Gerard (talk) 12:56, 27 January 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Anybody? - David Gerard (talk) 21:11, 6 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Tag removed for now, though of course feel free to replace, preferably with listing of objections - David Gerard (talk) 09:56, 12 April 2015 (UTC)[reply]