[OT] Re: When the FUD is all around (sniff).

[Jordan Crouse <jordanc@Censoft.com>]

On Tuesday 26 June 2001 06:34, Alan Cox mentioned:

> > I suppose they received some pression from M$, but if people read of a
> > FUD from a M$ employed, then they can guess what is going on, if it is a
> > newspaper usually telling facts in a correct way...
>
> It is common for newspaper staff to be corrupt, same with magazine people.
> Sometimes because people generally believe in a cause and are not impartial
> (which I've seen both pro and anti Linux btw) and sometimes because
> advertising revenue is a good thing.

>From reading the article, the author showed that he understood the open 
source world fairly well (better than my grandmother), even taking a crack at 
Microsoft at one point:

"il servizio Hotmail di Microsoft, che gestisce la posta per oltre 12 milioni 
di utenti Internet, non "gira", come si dice nel gergo tecnico, su 
piattaforma Microsoft, ma su di un aggregato di pacchetti Open Source."

"Hotmail, from Microsoft, doesn't run on a Microsoft platform but rather a 
collection of Open Source packages."

He also discussed Perl, Python and other projects at length.  Basically, from 
his writing, I think that he was more missinformed that actually pushing real 
FUD.  I'll bet when he investigated the story, somebody close to him 
mentioned that Linus had the final say on what went into the kernel, and he 
probably saw a few e-mails on Google from people with rejected patches, and 
he assumed that there was something rotten going on.  And it probably doesn't 
help that we are always fighting amongst ourselves over architecture, 
implementation and the such.  An uneducated person reading over the archives 
would probably assume that Alan and Linus are ready to start hunting each 
other down, and the articles they write would probably reflect this.  

> > The situation is going to be sad
>
> There is a saying in he UK 'You can fool all of the people some of the
> time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all
> of the people all of the time'. 

Didn't Abraham Lincoln say that?  :)

Jordan