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Zonker's (Novell) Disdain for the FSF and IDG's Conflict of Interests

Open Microsoft with Zonker



Summary: As Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier leaves Novell, his positions regarding freedom (and the FSF in particular) are analysed a little further, sometimes by his colleagues

Zonker, the iPad/DRM apologist (his colleagues from Novell, Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman, are pretty much the same) is being shown for his bias against the Free Software Foundation (FSF) over at The Source:

I was mildly interested to see if Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier would continue to spread his special brand of so-close-to-a-lie-why-not-just-call-it-that distortions once he left Novell. Well, now we have an answer:

Yes.

And – brace yourself for a shock here – he is targeting the FSF. Again. This time around, though we are treated to simple poor reason instead of the previous gross misrepresentations of Monsieurs Stallman and Moglen.


Let's not forget that Moglen incident. Anyway, Novell is looking for someone to replace Zonker and this is now being advertised at IDG, for which Zonker is also doing audiocasts (mostly with colleagues from Novell):

Brockmeier has done a pretty good job while at Novell, coordinating the community and marketing efforts around the popular openSUSE distro. It goes without saying that getting him on board lent a lot of legitimacy to Novell's business deal with Microsoft in 2006. Brockmeier has a lot of respect in the community, so when he calmly explained why Novell hadn't made a deal with the devil, people listened.


No, he told lies and he was told off for it. The bias above is telling and Zonker works for this publication, which creates a conflict of interests. He recently started writing for Ars Technica, which is a fan of Mono and Moonlight. On it goes:

I personally did not like Novell's decision to partner with Microsoft--in particular the patent protection agreement that prompted a knee-jerk response from the free software community to change GPL v3 during its draft phase. At the time, I voiced the opinion that if Microsoft wanted to have integration so badly, it could do it without patent cooperation agreements.

[...]

It will be interesting to see who lands in the now-open Community Manager spot at Novell. Those are going to be some big shoes to fill.


This is actually true (the latter part).

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