Ilias Aberkane writes:
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).
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:
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.