The rise of the FOSS spinmeister

By Sam Varghese
Thursday, 24 January 2008 18:00

Opinion and Analysis

In August 2003, a little more than three months after the SCO Group had filed a lawsuit against IBM, seeking damages for alleged breach of contract, I had an email exchange with Blake Stowell, who was then the public relations manager of the former company.
Having sent Stowell a detailed email asking him whether SCO planned to sue other Linux companies and received a reply in the negative, I went ahead and wrote a story. This, after I had asked Stowell a number of questions in context.

Stowell started getting queries from other news outlets as soon as the story appeared. He then realised that he had slipped up and his recourse, as with all spinmeisters, was to try and weave a fresh tale - he wanted to "clarify" things. (I have this exchange and also several similar emails, all trying to "clarify" one thing or another, sitting in my mail archives).

There was nothing to clarify as everything had been detailed down to the last painstaking comma when I wrote to him and Stowell found that he was dealing with someone who was not going to accept clarification when none was needed. I told him that I would carry his clarification if he admitted that he had screwed up - but that he wouldn't do.

The reason I bring this up is because this kind of individual used to be a rarity among companies which dealt, even marginally, in free and open source software.

But over the past few years, as the opportunities to make money from FOSS have grown, as viable business models have been developed for FOSS and the value of being known as "someone" in the FOSS sphere has increased, there has been a proliferation of the Stowell type, all of them geared towards self-aggrandisement even if it be at the expense of the project or company to which they are attached.

FOSS spinmeisters - and they come in all ages, and are of both sexes - pretend to have some technical skills but their ability lies mostly in being able to emit buzzwords and impress the half-ignorant. To some extent, they remind one of Meredith Johnson, one of the central characters in Michael Crichton's novel Disclosure - very good at product displays but a big zero when it comes to technical details.

The term spinmeister commonly means someone who handles public relations for a company but in the case of the FOSS species, they are everywhere, several posing as journalists when all they do is write an occasional piece, pushing this barrow or that. One thing is common - they all come from marketing backgrounds.