08.16.07
Knowledge is Our Friend, Not Our Foe
Cherish information, not brand names
It is very disappointing to find people who protest against this Web site, but it is not surprising. It is still seen as controversial site and the domain name does not help. Days ago, a long thread began in a forum that criticised the site not for its content, but for its existence. It’s akin to the “shoot the messenger’ strategy. Some hours ago came this one.
Let us just clarify that the best way to address inaccurate information is by being specific. When we challenged Miguel de Icaza to say what we interpreted wrongly, he did not have much to offer. It was all just vague accusations without substance.
Sadly enough, too many people believe what they prefer to believe. They ignore some inconvenient truths. A business-oriented talk at LinuxWorld was a fine example of this. Have a look at this recent report from Jack Loftus.
There wasn’t as much clapping as I thought there’d be. What I mean is; is when a user stepped up to the microphone to grill Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian about Microsoft, the GPLv3 and those infamous “coupons,” there wasn’t the zealous explosion of applause that I had become accustomed to over the years.
It seems like many people have been brainwashed by mainstream media in a Faux News-like fashion. Important angles of the story are simply overlooked (maybe deliberately, i.e. they get ignored). Remember SCO and all their shills, such as the SCO cheerleaders Dan Lyons and Rob Enderle? Some people thought that they sounded reasonable at the time. They lied. Enderle said that he saw code which was copied from UNIX and put in Linux.
Are they eating humble pie now that we discover that SCO may have knowingly faked the whole thing since day one? Given what we know after the court’s ruling, this very short video of SCO CDs destruction (a little more here) seems justified. In the past, SCO’s shills used such sights to compare Linux users to fanatics and terrorists (yes, that was a strategy used by Rob Enderle). Yesterday, one comment in this site compared Shane and I to the Taliban.
Another thing that escapes the media’s attention (and gains visibility in blogs instead) is the stagnation of Novell’s business. Novell is not in a good financial state, no matter what its public relations department says. We have proven this in many of the previous posts (about 970 of them so far) , some of which are tagged “Finance”.
Here is one recent story about someone who to decided to ditch Novell after a long time. There is a reason as well.
Dear Bob …
We’re going from Novell (dead end) to ActiveDirectory. And even as a developer (mostly Unix, but some PC), “they” want to lock down my desktop so I can’t install apps (not even give me a login I can switch to to do the installs, and switch back).
This might be one story among many similar ones.
Groklaw used to be characterised as an anti-SCO Web site (or an “IBM shill” when SCO started putting ‘placements’ in the media and then used these placements to subpoena Pamela). At the end, it turns out that Groklaw was right all along. So, going back to the title, let’s pursue information rather than be fed by corporate agenda and spokesmen, which journalists are so keen on quoting. Disagreements and mistake can be addressed through discussion, not by character assassination.
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.