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Linux Today Founder Calls for Boycott of Linux Today
dave writes "I founded and managed Linux Today in 1998, bringing it up from nothing into the most powerful and large Linux news website in the world, in less than a year. I am now calling on the Linux community to boycott my creation until its current owners stop accepting money from Microsoft to publish blatantly anti-Linux/pro-Microsoft ads."
These same ads are often the ones in the top bar of slashdot.. Occasionally there's a vertical one on the main page that's pretty much the same thing.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
You found a good place to complain. Slashdot runs Microsoft adds about how "mainframe Linux" is so much more expensive than Windows. The adds even site a study that was thouroughly discredited in slashdot news stories.
Slashdot has the same exact anti-Linux, pro-Microsoft ads. I've tried bringing this up, but was rejected.
Imagine if it read like this:
"I'm now calling on the Linux community to boycott Slashdot until its current owners stop accepting money from Microsoft to publish blatantly anti-Linux/pro-Microsoft ads."
I personally would call upon the community to click every Microsoft ad they see. They get cheap advertising if nobody clicks on them. And they're not going away if you don't. Microsoft is definitely the high bidder on most of our sites.
agreed, I've been noticing the "informative" ads on here recently regarding TCO of MS vs Linux and all sorts of other make me gag FUD, but I was wondering just how much control the people selling the ad-space (i.e. Linux Today and /.) have in the content, vs the ad buyers who can possibly dictate which websites they get served on... I have no experience in this arena, but I imagine it isn't a terribly far stretched idea to see a request of ads on certain websites from ad time buyers..
You click on the link and it takes you to another linux Today page, with slightly more clipping (WTF) . Only when you click the second link, do you get to see the actual article.
Two clicks to visit a External Article, No thanks.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
Install free, OS Adblock and you will not see any (well, almost) ads!
This is totally off topic and feel free to mod this down (I already took a no karma bonus), but this is totally untrue. Pro-lifers do open pregnancy clinics that do indeed steer them away from abortion, but they are NOT Planned Parenthood clinics. That's a very important distinction.
On topic: Go Dave- Linux Today started sucking when you left, I last looked about 4 months ago and it was a mess of a site. It sucks really bad.
OK, I work for Slashdot, but am not writing in any official capacity :)
;)
- Slashdot takes advertising.
- Some of the advertising Slashdot takes is from Microsoft.
- Microsoft advertising is paid for in U.S. dollars.
- The editorial side neither sells the ads nor chooses the advertisers; whether the ad at the top is for Microsoft, Red Hat, or The Estate of Jonas Savimbi, I'm just as surprised as anyone else by the particular banner that appears.
Above is just to point out that the ad-choice decision is not one I make
However (But! Nevertheless!), I don't think it's all that important anyhow. So long as ads are respectful of your browser (I hate Flash ads, and it goes without saying that no one is friends with popup ads or other eye-pokers), their content doesn't concern me a whole lot. (Could there be exceptions? Yes. But the MS ads I've seen on Slashdot, for example, have been tame as a churchmouse. Most of them don't even rise to the level of puffery, more straight 'product exists' notification.)
Ads for Microsoft Visual Studio appear on Slashdot; a lot of readers use that or similar products in their work. Ignoring the possibility that readers use source-secret software would be dumb on the part of the advertisers; they would be ignoring a rationally valuable resource. I'd prefer that people use more free, Free software --and they will. But I'm confident enough that people will choose open source stuff on their own for their own reasons that I don't think advertisements for The Other Kind are a huge concern. What would it say if they were? (Solar and wind power is great; there are still ads for gasoline generators in the back of Mother Earth News.)
I like seeing IBM and other companies push their open-source agendas (parallel and connected to their other agendas) in ads and other forums, but here, too, I don't think advertisements matter except as an input; people will still make up their own minds based on multiple, sometimes ineffable factors.
As at least one other poster has commented, wouldn't you rather the money flowed this direction than the other?
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
ads? what ads?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Plenty of that around HERE!!!!
You are taking away money from the competition, and putting ads on a page that most people ignore anyway.
Exactly, and *IF* he were smart he'd be using Mozilla/Firefox and (*gasp*) blocking ads.
And is linking to a site on
Sheesh.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
I sold Linux Today to them nearly 5 years ago. Any contracts I had with them are long since expired, and my relationship with them is the same as I have with any other company out there.
If I don't like what they are doing, then I, as a member of the Linux community can voice my opinion and even call for action.
dave
Are Linux Today's readers too stupid to think for themselves?
Rombuu, do you enjoy beating your wife? Come on, that's a really old troll. Ask a question that has no right answer and ignores clearly stated points. Here are those points:
All are legitmate. Microsoft adds are irritating and I hate seeing them. Besides being blatantly false, they are as visually annoying as any porn add. Running such garbage casts doubt on your editorial integrity and lessens the impact of your content. Worse, they might become dependent on M$ and join the long line of worthless Wintel publications ready to say anything. These are issues worth considering.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Technology Road Shows have 960% more bull?hit than Linux Expos. Get the facts.
Open Standards Portal
I guess you don't keep up with current events.
VA Linux is no more. They became VA Software years ago, changed almost all of their internal systems to Microsoft, and only hawk proprietary software (SourceForge).
IIRC, VA Software has little or nothing to do with this site anymore.
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
For example during the 1970's Cesar Chavez (who is for hispanics what Martin Luther King Jr. is for the blacks) led the nation in boycotting grapes. The effect was great enough to force the land owners to renegotiate favorable terms with the migrant land workers.
But you are right that in most cases the issue really isn't a big enough deal for people to bother. Also in this case the supporters did a very good job bringing things to the public eye, handing out flyers in front of grocery stores, to get people thinking about it right before they made a decision. Much more effective than posting in your blog, or a stupid chain email.
Yes, it has worked before. If you recall back to the civil rights time frame there was a bus company in montgomery alabama that got boycotted by black riders. Basicly, in the end, they stopped riding, bus company almost goes broke and finally compiles, black people could sit wherever they wanted and didn't have to move if someone else wanted to sit there. Atleast that's the jist of the story. So to answer your question, yes, boycotts work, it just requires people to stick to it.
Jisho - A Japanese English German Russian French Dictionary for the rest of us.
Yes, The biggest one that worked very quickly was when Adobe assisted the FBI in the arrest of a Russian programmer because he talked about DCMA circumvention in a public place in Las Vegas. The effect was so bad that Adobe stopped assiting the FBI and the later the FBI deceided that they would lose the case on appeal because of the First Amendment, they later only prosecuted the Russian corporation. I don't think this boycott is effective and will not last more then 1 day. Besides I like the anti-linux ads, they give me a chuckle.
Actually, privoxy doesn't work that way.
Privoxy is a web proxy, not a browser plugin. That means it slipstreams itself in between your browser and the server. When using privoxy, your actual web browser never actually directly requests anything from the web site itself. All of its requests go through privoxy, and (crucially) privoxy does not actually pass all of the incoming requests through to the remote server.
The result is that when you go to slashdot's home page and there is an ads.osdn.com banner at the top of the page, privoxy doesn't work by first downloading the ad from the server and then preventing you from seeing it. Instead it works by recognizing ads.osdn.com as an advertising site, and not even sending the HTTP GET request at all.
Now, it is true that privoxy has a second, independently functional ad-blocking mechanism that does rely on post-processing the ad after it is downloaded, but ads.osdn.com is well known enough that privoxy can (and does) already decide to eschew even the initial GET request based purely on the URL input.
Its not entirely on line, but over on USENET rec.guns most people are boycotting Smith And Wesson. Looking at their balance sheet it seems to be working. Been going on actively for nearly 10 years, with the goal to kill S&W as an example to others of why you don't sell out on your customers.
I've looked at linuxtoday every day for the
last 3 years. However that stopped 2 weeks
ago when I switched over to lxer
It's a little broader and much less noise.
Try both over 56K modem to really see what I mean.