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Forbes' Dan Lyons Hates Groklaw, Wants to Be BFF with Linux
Anastasia Beaverhousen writes "In what many will consider either a total change of heart (or complete BS), Forbes columnist Dan Lyons was caught on video by Linux.com (also owned by Sourceforge) at a recent conference professing his undying love for Linux. The words, "pry it out of my hands at gunpoint" were even used at one point. 'After wading though some of the Lyons vs. PJ mire while writing this brief piece, I found myself wondering, "Aren't we all supposed to be grown-up journalists, or bloggers, or whatever? Aren't Linux and Free Software supposed to be about love and harmony and making the world a better place? Can't we, please, smile on our brother, everybody love one another, right now?" In any case, old-hippie sentiments aside, Dan Lyons says that despite the many attacks on him as a supposedly anti-Linux attack dog, he loves Linux. And uses it. And that he has trouble understanding why anyone would think he doesn't love Linux. '"
Is there somewhere I can sign up and profess my internal desires to get in a cat fight with windows and internet explorer?
from my cold, dead heart!
Sure Dan, we love you too. Now, go fetch that Vista bone and Bill will give you a biscuit. Yeah, yeah, good boy.
For those of us who aren't omnipotent, who is this guy?
This guy loves Linux the same way a politician loves the media: It makes both an excellent tool for use, and an excellent target to attack in order to bolster one's own status. So, as long as he can play both sides, he gets to think of himself as the cleverest person who ever tricked a system into working for him.
In other words, just another self-deluded troll actively preying on his audience.
Just a wild guess, but maybe because we actually read his pieces parroting SCOX and attacking the Linux developer community?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
For several years, he was front and center in the SCO FUD campaign - on the wrong side.
His sudden "road to Damascus" moment is about as "convenient" as someone becoming a "born-again Christian" after being arrested.
Believe at your own risk.
I can just picture Dan, in his set of Care Bear PJs, up at night with his warm fuzzy Linux laptop, using it to write furious diatribes about the freetards as Fake Steve.
He's just channeling Stephen Colbert.
Its time for a good old style lynchin.
I mean, shoo, you bitch. We dont want your hypocryticall ass here. Or better yet, show us your ubuntu laptop, refuse to write for companies running MS server-side, show us something to believe you.
NO SIG
Just like his Microsoft handlers.
I've seen enough of his FUD to know what he's about.
He's just trying to recover some "street cred" so he can go at Linux again in the future.
POS.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"pry it out of my hands at gnupoint"
I'm an attention whore!
If you paid $699 for the license, wouldn't you?
The real story for those here who care to see it, is that there's a huge population of people for whom Linux is not mutually exclusive from Windows.
.Net, it's obvious that the LAM* stack is the best server-side technology, and just as obvious (in my personal case) that Windows is the best environment for my dev box.
People who can love linux without hating Microsoft. People who can objectively use the best tool for the job.
I'm a web developer. On any project save for
(and what on Earth would he say? Torvalds is one Hell of an act to follow, y'know?)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This site is so funny... who gives a rats ass about these people? Yet the slashtards are so inwardly focused on their own insignificant microverse they post story after story. WOW. VERY IMPRESSIVE SITE HERE. GLAD I READ THIS.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
..."Can't we, please, smile on our brother, everybody love one another, right now?" *gasps*
...declared Lotus Domino/Notes dead several years ago...and, of course, like always, he was wrong by a wide margin. This guy is to journalism as Dick Cheney is to gun safety.
Only when you put him in a cage match with Maureen O'Gara and Laura Didio...maybe then I'll cheer for him. Awww screw it, I'd be hoping that when Stallman gets done with those ninjas he'd jump into the cage and steel chair all of those bastards.
http://ask.metafilter.com/31504/Me-biased-against-the-group-No-some-of-my-best-friends-are-of-that-group
There was a time when every bigot would preface his hateful remarks with: "Some of my best friends are black."
Anyway, Microsoft is changing its tack. Their favorite strategy continues to be embrace, extend, exterminate. If they can't buy Linux and they can't sue it to death, they can send in their foot soldiers to subvert it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
I believe that's how he characterized all Linux users.
Gotta love his lavish praise of "intrepid reporter" Maureen O'Gara. Dan just loved the way Maureen relentlessly stalked, and harassed, PJ and PJ's elderly mother. Especially the way Maureen bragged about obtaining, and researching PJ's private cell-phone records, and looking inside PJ's residence, and bashing PJ's religious beliefs. Maureen's action were so vile, that the entire editorial staff of linuxworld resigned in disgust. Dan loved it.
Don't forget about how Danny squealed like a stuck pig about bloggers, and message board posters, not giving their true identity, then he turns out to be the fake Steve Jobs.
Clearly, he misses the whole point, probably deliberately. Whether he personally likes Linux is meaningless. I don't dislike people for not liking Linux. People can hate Linux all they want, and they can say so, doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I think they sometimes make some good points. And, for all I care, people can hate groklaw, or PJ, as well.
My problem with Lyons is that he's a liar, a hypocrite, and a bully. For somebody who loves Linux so much, he was certainly quick to side with the company that was trying to destroy Linux, and to have a complete hissy-fit against who opposed the scam. And where are these 67 positive Linux articles? Is he sure it isn't more like one or two, writen after it was decided that scox doesn't even own UNIX? And where are his retractions and apologies after it turned out the PJ, and the message board posters were right all along? Why isn't he slamming scox and msft for the obvious scam?
Back when it was possible -- just barely -- for an intelligent person to think SCO might still have a case that they were just coincidentally showing no proof of, Dan Lyons was among those trying to portray SCO as in all likelihood a bunch of swell guys who had produced something of value, only to see it ripped off, and were now simply seeking just compensation for having been ripped off.
That in itself is proof of nothing except excessive credulity.
What makes Lyons a two-faced mealymouth is that in the same time period he wrote the infamous "Linux's Hit Men" article, in which he excoriated the Free Software Foundation for seeking compensation/compliance in cases where swell programmers had produced something of value and put it under the GPL only to see the fruits of their labors ripped off. The Foundation, Lyons tells the reader, "doesn't want royalties--it wants you to burn down your house, or at the very least share it with cloners ... maybe, as some suggest, the foundation wants GPL-covered code to creep into commercial products so it can use GPL to force open those products." Lyons' final line? "Such a pity, comrade."
So, let's sum up. When it's a commercial company which claims it has been ripped off (even if it's actively refusing to show anyone its evidence of the alleged ripoff under reasonable conditions) Lyons thinks it's perfectly okay for them to demand huge financial recompense. When it's open source coders that get ripped off, however, Lyons thinks it's pretty jerky for anyone to actually make the rippers-off comply with the license for the code they chose to use -- if not some sort of sinister conspiracy.
Gee, I can't think why anyone would doubt the sincerity of Lyons' love for Linux and open source.
If people are to respect the law, perhaps the law should begin by respecting the people.
No. That's bullshit. Anyone looking at SCO's financials would see that they were losing business back before they filed the suit.
Only an idiot would believe that story without checking ANY of the facts.
And that's exactly what Forbes and Lyons did. In fact, they did worse. They refused to check any of the facts and instead they parroted, as if they were fact, the unsubstantiated lies that SCO kept spewing.
On the contrary, last night at a Fake Steve Jobs appearance/meetup in Los Angeles, Dan was recommending that everyone read Groklaw, that it was one of the best tech blogs out there. He even spelled out the URL for an audience member who hadn't heard of it.
"...he has trouble understanding why anyone would think he doesn't love Linux."
And O.J. Simpson had trouble understanding why people thought he didn't love Nicole.
Another quality post from Slashdot's resident karma-negative troll!
How much credit can you give an "industry pundit" who keeps repeating that SCO is going to win their case and doesn't change his story until after the court decision eviscerating their case is officially published.
PJ and Growlaw attended the court hearings, studied the court documents and researched various unix/linux IP history. What did Lyons do? He occasionally chatted up the SCO folks and asked them what was going to happen. Heck, even I can predict the past with remarkable accuracy.
The funny thing about his apology is that he can help but slip in a back handed insult by calling Groklaw "amateur sleuths", the implication being that he is a PROFESSIONAL journalist and while he did get THIS particular story wrong he is better than those amateurs at Groklaw.
>>I mean, how often does a publicly traded company sue someone 100x their size based on nothing but hot air?
When their company is dead anyway, and msft is paying for the lawsuit, and msft is making sure that time small-time redneck scammers are making (for them) big bucks? McBride is getting $34K a month, btw.
Forget this David vs Golieth, BS. The financing for the entire scam was arranged by msft. And msft has twice the market cap of IBM.
Surely I can't be the first person to notice this, but would someone please tell me that this guy's middle name starts with a D?
Of course, that's just my opinion. Lets review his record.
He came out strongly against blogs, bloggers, and all such. Only professional journalists like him should write.
He's been saying for years that Lotus Notes was dead and gone, just to stir the pot and get talked about.
He went to a lot of trouble to stand up for Sarah Radicatti (the Radicatti Group) after she was caught astroturfing her own badly written report.
He wrote a blog calling himself "The Fake Steve Jobs" -- which is only slightly more distant from true journalism than his articles usually are.
Other than that, I'm a huge fan.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
>"He's just a troll calling himself a "journalist"."
You shouldn't insult trolls by saying they're as low as Lyons.
Some differences:
-
Trolls will actually do research to back up their points. Lyin' Lyons never did.
-
Trolls might be passionate about their positions and make you THINK!. Lyin' Lyons only wanted to self-promote.
-
Some people say trolls might not be fit to sleep with pigs. Lyons, on the other hand, looked to be pretty much in bed with the MogTroll
.Lyons isn't a troll - and he's not a journalist. Doesn't do research. Doesn't have the necessary skepticism or "show me - I'm from Missourri" cynicism necessary to be a reporter. He's a publicity hack.
Kevin Smith on Prince
Andy Tanenbaum, the author of Minix, had a very interesting story about another SCO frontman, Ken Brown. http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/ Tanenbaum is somewhat famous for his advocacy of microkernel operating systems. The Linus Torvalds vs Andy Tanenbaum debates on the merits of microkernel (MINIX) operating systems versus monolithic (Linux) operating systems is something of a legend. Nevertheless, Tanenbaum defends Linux fairly vigorously, and this is another comment on SCO's, Dan Lyon's, and Ken Brown's general lack of research.
I read he wanted to be a BBF for Linux, not BFF .... BIG difference. (whew)
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
I haven't read any of his crap in a long time. I discovered ages ago he was either an idiot or a liar. And that choice is not mutually exclusive when it comes to Lyons.
Am I the only one upset with his pronunciation of Gentoo and Ubuntu? Where he says jen-too and yoo-bun-too, I always thought it was Ghen-too and oo-BOON-too. Hmmm, only me? Ok.
LRN 2 SWM
"idk, my BFF Linux?"
You are a MS user?
Dan Lyons was a Linux hater before SCO went down the drain.
No one wants to stay on the losers' side.
Just some got a backbone.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
idk, my bff Jill?
By your logic, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein should have taken the word of the US president over some tipster coming to them with slanderous information that clearly could not be true.
If you want to pretend to be a journalist, you got to dig when someone claims something. Try to find the truth. NOT just swallow it hook, line and sinker.
If you swallow, and then someone else tries to point out your wrong and you then attack them without AGAIN trying to find out the truth, you are not just amzingly stupid, the question has to be asked wether you aren't part of the lie.
Who is to say he didn't change his tune when SCO's bribes stopped coming?
The guy has two options, either he is amazing incompetent or he is corrupt.
As for Forbes being a business magazine, they should certainly know that plenty of businesses are build on a fairy tail, and that CEO's lie all the time, this was POST bubble, and POST enron. Even Forbes must have heard of those.
If anything, the words of CEO about his company are ALWAYS to be distrusted, after all, he has an interest.
You seem to have lack an understanding of what a journalist is supposed to be.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Here's hoping Linux discriminates a bit finer in its definition of 'friend'...
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I agree with your overall analysis, but you seem to miss, or willfully ignore the one thing Lyons gets right. I hope this doesn't come off as a defense of Lyons, but rather as an illustration of an often overlooked or soft-pedaled or acquiesced (especially by the Slashdot readership) point. Lyons wrote, as you quote:
"... maybe, as some suggest, the foundation wants GPL-covered code to creep into commercial products so it can use GPL to force open those products."
Do they? That may be tough to claim, but it is certainly clear that Richard Stallman wants exactly that. Have you read his writings? He writes repeatedly and clearly that he wants (and predicts) the end of commercial software, everywhere. He is an idealist, and additionally a fanatic. Many of his writings appear on gnu.org under the subject, and subdirectory "philosophy". Read his stuff before you size him up as innocuous.
Do you understand WHY he included in his GNU Public License the conditions he did? It's considered one of the greatest "hacks" ever precisely because it is constructed such that the base of software it governs tends only to grow and never to shrink, thus very effectively becoming more widespread in use and in mindshare and begetting a self-enhancing vicious cycle. To quote RMS himself (from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html/):
"The GPL is not Mr. Nice Guy."
You have got to read that essay if you haven't already. In it, Stallman crosses the line from mostly harmless crank-zealotry to insidious zealotry. Richard Stallman really does want to tell impose restrictions on software use. The people who agree with his goals and their requisite restrictions conveniently turn a blind eye to his use of copyright law to tell other people what they can do with software. From above: "When the goal is to help others as well as oneself, we call that idealism." No, the concept he's talking about is Altruism (from a vigorous, rigorous, and centuries-long discussion in philosophy). He attempts to conflate his particular altruism into Idealism. Coming from the one who so correctly and deftly apprehends the conflation of concepts of "copyright", "trademark" and "patent" law, I don't think his attempt at conflation is accidental. I think it's propaganda. He's smart enough to know better, and fanatic enough to turn around and use the same tactic's effectiveness for his own ends.
Do you understand the choice to call it the "General Public License" instead of the "GNU Public License" as I just intentionally misquoted? See above: it rather strongly implies (via English 'general') that it is in some sense the first, best, broadest or most otherwise applicable license that a developer might choose for releasing software. This serves Stallman's purpose, but it is disingenuous. Mr. Stallman is not Mr. Nice Guy either; he's playing for the win, not for the nice.
Once, some years ago now, a developer named Linus Torvalds chose the GPL for a useful piece of software because he thought the license was "good enough" and was more interested in getting his software out than in Stallman's (or anyone's) ideas on what people should or shouldn't do with software. Have you been paying attention to the recent head-butting and remarks between those two? It is clear even from recent history, let alone the complete record of discourse over the last 20-ish years in each person's case, that Stallman's goal is to convey his definition of "free" software licensing as far as possible, while it is Torvalds' goal to spread useful software as far as possible without getting bogged down in somebody else's abstruse idealism. Remember who said "... if you don't want to lose your freedom, don't follow [Torvalds]"? How recent was that (6 weeks ago!), and why do you suppose it's telling?
Stallman's goal might be the one fact Lyons has gotten right in his years-long journalistic crusade against Open or Free software. Stallman correctly makes a distinction between these two movements, bu
There's a nice article about this on RoughlyDrafted: Daniel Lyons: Fake Steve Jobs and the SCO Shill Who Hated Linux
It is fairly obvious that if Daniel Lyons suddenly professes a love for Linux, the only reason is to attract more pageviews. Using his alter ego "Fake steve jobs" he still likes to call Linux users "freetards" as much as ever.
Anyway, his articles (written as "Fake" Steve Jobs) about the music industry are still very entertaining and spot-on: The music industry nobs have finally figured out [Apple is] doing. But with regards to Linux or anything even remotely touching free software, I'd mostly ignore his comments.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
Paid off.. ha.. maybe he simply isn't a very good journalist or worse, that he's just 'not intellectually inquisitive'.
He should be happy that some here think he's smart but paid for.
re:
"Others in that highly partisan crowd have suggested that I wanted SCO to win, and even that I was paid off by SCO or Microsoft. Of course that's not true. I've told these folks it's not true. Hasn't stopped them."
I think the definition of friend is clear, the problem with the classification of Dan Lyons.
He is not an user, he's an abuser.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
it is based on OOo 1.1, just like the productivity editors in Notes 8 are at the moment. The point of Symphony is that it is OOo inside an Eclipse framework. If you have other stuff running in the Eclipse framework then you can run it together with the Symphony stuff in the same framework and talk to it like it was just another Eclipse plugin (which it is - roughly speaking, there is the IBM Expeditor framework around it, but it is effectively running within Eclipse). If you want to have your Office suite inside Eclipse with your other stuff then you can play with Symphony now and figure out what you are going to do with it. At, or shortly after Lotusphere 2008 (end of January) the next version of Notes 8 will come out with a fresh cut of OpenOffice.org with the LGPL code (SISL vs LGPL was roughly the reason why it is using 1.1 today but they have got over that) I expect Symphony with the OOo 2.3 code to be released in Febuary (why release at the same time as Notes 8.1 when you can release a month later and get two loads of headlines?). If Symphony is still unusable at that point I will join you in lambasting it. I am not an IBMer this is just moderately informed speculation.
Well, just goes to show, even an idiot like Dan Lyons is right now and again.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
You must be new here.
/obligatory
//not fark
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Isn't everyone jumping on the linux bandwagon for a little P.R.?
I'm not, are you?
In answer to TFA's questions:
"Aren't we all supposed to be grown-up journalists, or bloggers, or whatever?
No. In fact, most people blaghing and journaling and whatevering are either very young, or very immature. I'm 55 and I never managed to grow up, thank God.
Forbes is a religious magazine, devoted to the worshipers of money, the love of which the Christian bible says is the root of all evil. Lyons is a troll. Now, I've wondered for years, if you troll trolls (especially in in meatspace), does that make you a troll yourself? I hope not!
Aren't Linux and Free Software supposed to be about love and harmony and making the world a better place?
No, that would be Bhuddhism, which worshipers of money consider to be even more evil than Christianity.
Can't we, please, smile on our brother, everybody love one another, right now?
Ha ha ha HA AH HE HE ho ho HO HO HA HA HA STOP IT YER KILLIN' ME!!!
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
That's the best comment I've ever seen!
No, wait ...
Someday we'll have a mo' betta operating system (I predict it will have no mouse, although there will be mouse-driven interfaces available in userland for the typing-impaired). But it probably won't happen in my lifetime. In the meantime linux is the best bang-for-buck solution for most (not all) problems I encounter.
That was the guy.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I still have a hard time believing that ANYONE takes "Pamela Jones" seriously. Has anyone ever seen "her"? Has anyone ever talked to "her"? Has anyone ever photographed "her"? No? Probably because it's not a woman at all.... but, some dude pretending to be a woman. When "Pamela" is willing to come out and show "herself" then maybe we could take this seriously. Meanwhile.... I don't trust a word that he/she says.
Notes is still the #1 enterprise mail and collaboration platform. In the U.S., that margin is below the level of error but in Europe and Asia it is significant.
Microsoft continues to be better at making software people like to use at their desktop. Its what they're good at. Yet from an enterprise I.T. perspective, the Domino/Notes platform remains much cheaper and easier to manage. It also remains much more secure, much more cross platform (there's nothing at all cross platform about Exchange) and much more flexible.
What's more, the Lotus platform now has a client built on Eclipse that is FULLY SUPPORTED in Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms at the workstation -- and they're increasing platforms rather than decreasing them. It speaks java, web services, smtp, imap, nntp, snmp, http, and ldap, and integrates with just about anything. Compare that with say...exchange.
So, what's the problem? Oh, and don't tell me "I used it once in...." or "I use it at my company" if we're talking about version 4, 5, or 6. Those are now YEARS out of date. Its like that Macs don't multitask well if you're basing that on the old Mac OS and ignoring OSX. Sure, my old Mac SE doesn't multitask well either.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Lyons is not comprising the service for the money he received of SCO. As McBride is a license troll, I think if you provocate him, he will *sue* Lyons for "breach of aggreement".
So why, oh being of infinite wisdom, can I not buy games for Linux?
If Linux is so obviously superior, and all the major makers are on board, and Microsoft is all about 'intentional waste', why is Assassin's Creed not coming to a distro near you?
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
is a strongly typed, compilable python. Also, it should be able to handle memory like c.
This sig sucks.