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Alexis de Tocqueville Institution

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ta bu shi da yu (talk | contribs) at 13:22, 21 June 2004 (→Alex de Tocqueville Institution: added triva section - with note on broken links/images as well as direct quote from website). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (AdTI) is a Washington, DC-based think tank, named after the French historian Alexis de Tocqueville. It was founded in 1988. Its president is Ken Brown and its chairman is Gregory Fossedal. It has 14 staff researchers.

Its mission statement states that "we follow the principles of Tocqueville himself ... among these liberal ideas are civil liberty, political equality, and economic freedom and opportunity."

The AdTI is most famous for its reports questioning Linux and open source, which its detractors hold were written at the behest of Microsoft. Many opponents of AdTI regard it as a mere public relations front for its backers. While the Institution's reports have been strongly criticised in technical circles, its intended audience is legislators, newspaper editors and talk show hosts.

Funding sources

The AdTI maintains a strong policy never to reveal its backers beyond legal requirements. In 2002, Greg Fossedal stated, "it isn't our general policy to discuss who does and doesn't fund de Tocqueville, except in the case of qualified press or public officials who are willing to make symmetrical disclosures." (communication with David Skoll of Roaring Penguin Software)

Ken Brown summarized the Institution's funding policy: "We don't talk about money with anybody ... but we'll accept money from anybody." (LinuxInsider, 19 May 2004)

Brown later denied influence from the Institution's backers: "I publish what I think and that's it. I don't work for anybody's PR machine." (ZDNet, 20 May 2004)

As reported by MediaTransparency, the AdTI's backers from 1988 to 2002 include:

Projects funded include:

  • numerous grants from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation "to support education-reform research and activities";
  • a number of grants to support the Teacher Choice Project;
  • $50,000 in 2000 to "support research on teacher unions and education reform" from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation;
  • in 1998, $168,750 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation "to support research and writing on new tactics of U.S. progressive movement in the Post-Cold War era";
  • A total of $30,000 in 1995 and 1996 from the John M. Olin Foundation for "the Action Plan for Defense Privatization, conducted by the Committee for the Common Defense";
  • In 1998 $5,000 from the John M. Olin Foundation to "support promotion for The Democratic Century, a book by Gregory Fossedal."

The Capital Research Center reports funding by the Fannie Mae Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, and the Amoco Foundation.

Microsoft has been one of the Institution's backers for five years, although a Microsoft spokesman said they had not funded any specific research [1]. Microsoft funds several think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute.

Tobacco industry work

As part of the 1998 Tobacco Settlement Agreement, the Philip Morris corporation released millions of pages of documents concerning their operations. These detail how, after the Environmental Protection Agency moved in 1993 to have second-hand tobacco smoke declared a carcinogen, Philip Morris hired the AdTI to campaign against the move. This resulted in the 1994 paper Science, Economics, and Environmental Policy: A Critical Examination.

In 1994, part of the Clinton administration's health plan proposed an increase in cigarette sales tax from 24¢ a packet to 99¢ a packet. Merrick Carey, the then president of the AdTI, put a plan to Philip Morris whereby, for $30,000 a month, the Institution would conduct a campaign for them. The AdTI presented itself as a "bipartisan" economic think tank presenting an analysis of the Clinton plan, nowhere mentioning they were directly hired by Philip Morris to oppose the tax increase.

Tobaccodocuments.org contains a number of searchable documents produced as court discovery linking AdTI to Lorillard and Phillip Morris corporations. AdTI is linked to Dr. Fred Singer in the tobacco documents [2], the Cooler Heads Coalition [3], Consumer Alert [4], Heartland Institute [5] [6] and the Competitive Enterprise Institute [7] [8] [9].

Education

The AdTI has produced a considerable number of papers on education policy. It runs a program called the Teacher Choice Project, advocating vouchers for education and marking unions as bad for teachers. Most of these were produced during 2000 and 2001.

Defense

When the B-2 bomber program was threatened in 1995, the AdTI organised a letter to President Bill Clinton signed by seven former Pentagon chiefs: Dick Cheney, Caspar Weinberger, Frank Carlucci, Harold Brown, James Schlesinger, Donald Rumsfeld and Melvin Laird [10].

Open source and Linux

The AdTI is best known as the source of a series (2002-present) of studies on the theme of intellectual property in the software industry. The Institution's reputation suffered when it emerged that it had obtained funding from Microsoft concurrent with authoring Opening the Open Source Debate (June 2002), a report critical of Microsoft's open-source rivals. This report claimed that open source software was inherently less secure than proprietary software and hence a particular target for terrorists.

These studies culminated in an as yet unreleased book, Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' of Open Source Code (prereleased mid-May 2004), questioning the generally accepted provenance of Linux and other open source projects, and recommending that government-funded programming should never be licensed under the GNU General Public License but under the BSD license or similar simple permissive licenses.

The book claims that Linus Torvalds used source code taken from Minix, a small Unix-like operating system used in teaching computer science, to create Linux 0.01, on the theory that no mere student could write an entire Unix-like kernel single-handedly — although writing a kernel of similar size and capabilities is a standard part of many computer science degrees.

The book's claims have been seriously questioned, including by many of those it quotes in support of its thesis, such as Andrew S. Tanenbaum, author of Minix, Dennis Ritchie, one of the creators of Unix and Richard Stallman, leader of the GNU project. Alexey Toptygin said he had been commissioned by Brown to find similarities between Minix and Linux 0.01 source code, and found no support for the theory that Minix source code had been used to create Linux; this study is not mentioned in the book. Others have said that quotes attributed as being from an "interview with AdTI" were in fact from prerelease papers (Ilkka Tuomi) or from messageboard posts (Charles Mills, Henry Jones).

After a month of almost universal derision towards the book from the technical press, Microsoft also repudiated it in mid-June, a spokesman calling it "an unhelpful distraction from what matters most — providing the best technology for our customers." (WSJ, 14 June 2004)

The later papers stand in contrast to the Institution's 2000 paper, The Market Place Should Rule on Technology, which discusses Linux as a direct competitor to Microsoft Windows.

Staff (2004)

  • Ken Brown, President
  • Gregory Fossedal, Chairman
  • Christopher Cox, Co-Chairman, AdTI Board of Advisors
  • John Norquist, Co-Chairman, AdTI Board of Advisors
  • Gordon Macklin, Co-Chairman, Market History Research Program
  • Robert Toricelli, Co-Chairman, IMF Assessment Project
  • Donald Payne, Co-Chairman, Opportunity Africa
  • Alveda King, Senior Fellow, Education Policy and Civil Rights
  • Becky Norton Dunlop, Director, Democracy and the Environment Research Program
  • David Kirkpatrick, Fellow, Education Policy
  • Dan Evans, Teacher Choice Fellow
  • Don Koniezco, Teacher Choice Fellow
  • Marilyn Ketter Rittmeyer, Teacher Choice Fellow
  • Sahir Zuberi, Webmaster

Trivia

Note about the AdTI Website

At the current time of writing, June 21, 2004, there are many broken links. For instance, they have a link entitled "help Ken Brown get it", which at one point was a link to a form that allowed people to report factual inaccuracies about Samizdat, Ken Brown's piece on Linux. The link is http://adti.net/ysurvey/survey.php?s_id=4 - this brings up a 403 Forbidden message. Another webpage linked to from http://www.adti.net/mission.html is http://www.adti.net/pubsaccomps1.html. This brings up a 404 Not Found error, with the text "The requested URL http:// was not found on this server." (suggesting a poorly configured web-server). Another example is The Tocqueville award, which features several broken images.

Front page of http://www.adti.net, 21 June 2004

The front page of AdTI's website has the following blurb:

Open source tip of the day. Open-sourcers hate to pay for copyrighted material -- even when it's the much-admired prose of Lee Gomes at The Wall Street Journal. How to read Gomes for free, given the strict copyright policies at Dow-Jones? Answer: <a href="http://linuxtoday.com/search.php3?author=Lee:Gomes">click here</a>, to be whisked to Linux Today, where there's a large archive of links to many of Gomes's magazine and Journal articles, posted free at sites such as lucifer.com, news.excite.com, and even zdnet.com. "I always read Gomes off the Linux Today links," chirps a correspondent to AdTI's message boards. Warning: Sometimes the links go down, as the DJ barristers comb the world for pirated Journal content. "I have one word for you in that case," another Gomes fan writes: "google cache." Well two words. "But it beats having to shell out $300 for the d---Journal."

However, it appears that this is actually quite misleading because the link in question leads to a list of Lee Gomes' articles. These article links, in turn, lead to a page with a few brief quotes from his article with a direct link to the actual article near the bottom of the page.

AdTI writings

Tobacco

Education

Technology, open source and intellectual property

Other

Criticism

Science, Politics and Environmental Policy: A Critical Examination (1994)

Opening the Open Source Debate (2002)

Samizdat: And Other Issues Regarding the 'Source' of Open Source Code (2004)

AdTI notes recent attacks on web site (2004)

Samizdat's critics ... Brown replies (2004)

News coverage

This article includes material from Disinfopedia.

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