Does Forbes hate OSS?

[poofyhairguy]

This is almost funny:

http://www.forbes.com/intelligentinfrastructure/2005/06/15/jboss-ibm-linux_cz_dl_0615jboss.html?partner=yahootix&referrer=

The name of the article is:


Open Source Smack-Down

Here is the funniest quote:



Sounds like the dot-com bubble, except that this time it's not just investors who will get burned. Customers are taking a risk too. Because when these open source software providers burn through their venture funding and go out of business, customers will need to either hire teams of expensive techies to maintain that orphaned code or pay someone to rip out the old stuff and replace it with something new. Either way, all that free software is suddenly going to look awfully expensive.

This is the very benefit open source people talk about all the time- when the producer goes away, you still have access to the code.

Hmm....Forbes has it out for Linux...oh well...their loss...

[rider343]

Putz!!!

[Adrenal]

Lets just hope the typical thing doesn't happen, and that Forbes doesn't get flooded by hate mail. I hate it when people do that, if you want others to take seriously, you can't act like children

[TravisNewman]

yeah, what's up with Forbes lately? Did they get a nice chunk of MS shares or something? It's getting a bit ridiculous.

[poofyhairguy]

Lets just hope the typical thing doesn't happen, and that Forbes doesn't get flooded by hate mail.

Man I hope that doesn't happen!

[GrumpySimon]

It's not Forbes necessarily, it's Daniel Lyons, who is well known as an anti-FLOSS troll. He's almost as bad as Maureen O'Hara.

Seriously - google him, and check his track record of anti-FLOSS rants.

--Simon

[Optimal Aurora]

Are they paid by Berkeley or Microsoft... because they seem to like to support them and all... Strange

[Spoofhound]

Sounds like a journo scratching around for something to write about. Nothing much happening that he understands so he starts stirring the s*%t to see what floats up. Find a nice David and Goliath comaprison (JBoss and IBM), add some stuff about lunches being eaten, enterprise systems being screwed up and investments going down the toilet and voila! - you've got something that many people will perceive as "the truth". Trolls aren't big into thinking but they can make an impact. The only cool trolls reside on Pratchett's Discworld!

[crun]

It's also proven to be a good way of getting those important reading-figures up. There's seem to be more and more of these people about and whenever they publish something aggrevating like this, it will be linked to by all kinds of sites.

It doesn't even matter that he gets his facts as wrong as he does - most of his audience will all too readily beleive what he's telling them, and the attention he will stir up from the OSS community will get his article read even more.

Oh and Spoofhound - you're in for a treat in the next Pratchett novel - there'll be a big part in it for the trolls ;)

[blinksilver]

a money hungry group of elephants??? why would they like OSS, sorry to offend anyone is rep, i don't mean the whole, but there is a goup of them out there that really gets me going