Boycott "Boycott Novell"

Recently on FSDaily, there has been a flood of stories being submitted from the site Boycott Novell. This site claims to be "Exploring the reality behind exclusionary deals with Microsoft and their subtle (yet severe) implications".

The keyword is "Reality". Unfortunately, there is not a lot of reality or even any facts behind Boycott Novell's articles, which seem to come several times daily. Let me explain:

I once knew a man who suffered from autism. He would take any single event out of context and create a full paranoid backstory around it, and start spreading it around as if it were the truth. If somebody told him that they didn't think Hi-5's latest album was as good as their previous albums, he would start telling people that Hi-5 had fired their previous music producers due to budget cuts and that fans were threatening to stop listening to Hi-5. The trouble was, this autistic guy believed every lie he created, and that's what made himself so believable!

Boycott Novell must be run by an autism sufferer, because it does *exactly the same thing*. If somebody in the free software community says that they feel ambiguous about Mono, then Boycott Novell starts writing articles about how people en-masse are deleting Mono from their systems, and that Microsoft is secretly funding Mono's development through Novell in an attempt to create a case to sue Linux users for patent infringements.

This would all be very spooky, except that they provide NO EVIDENCE of anything they claim. The closest thing to "evidence" would be when they quote previous articles they've written.

Most recently, Boycott Novell has published a story about how Mark Shuttleworth has supposedly "sold-out" to Microsoft by having licensed Windows Media codecs in the new Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Oh, and Mono, of course. Look at the source of this shocking revelation: their own IRC channel!  A more recent edition of the article says that Mark Shuttleworth should "be wise of the mistakes of others" in licensing Microsoft technology. Yeah; every consumer electronics company *really* got burnt by putting licensed Windows Media decoding in their DVD players! Sony and Samsung certainly didn't survive the fallout of putting WMA playback in their MP3 players! </sarcasm>

The story even implies that Canonical has cut a Novell-style deal with Microsoft, just because he said he is willing to work with Microsoft when and where interests do not conflict, and where there is transparency. The case he provides is a good one, and I especially urge you to read the last paragraph.

No Canonical-Microsoft deal has been forged. Licensing of the codecs has come not through Microsoft, but through Fluendo who have native Gstreamer versions of the codecs that reportedly work better anyway.

I've had enough of Boycott Novell. I have to read parts of the stories (not articles, stories) as I'm browsing FSdaily. Attacking anything and everything is the mission for every day. Sometimes I wish they'd conduct a full ethnic cleansing of their own computers, deleting all lines of code contributed by anyone who's had any contact indirectly with Microsoft, which would result in the complete breakage of their systems and an end to the flow of FUD from their site.

But if there was a culture shift at Boycott Novell, so they could start reporting on real shady deals, and things that are definitely bad for Free Software, then I'd be happy to read their site. Heck, I'd be happy to write for it as long as it gets some actual sources for information, rather than behaving like my autistic aquaintance. Oh, and when it removes the "Communist Credibility Index"  from the site, which is a truly McCarthyist creation of theirs.

Until then, let's boycott the site, and click the "Negative" button on their stories on FSDaily to bury them.