BoycottNovell: just another website pushing a point of view

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 28 October 2008 04:21

Opinion and Analysis

Four days ago, an article purporting to analyse the raison d'etre behind the website BoycottNovell.com appeared on the linux.com site. The author, Bruce Byfield, who styles himself as a "computer journalist", however, failed to tell his reading public that the piece was just a thinly disguised and veiled attack on the person who runs the BoycottNovell site.
Byfield revealed the reason for the article only in the third paragraph from the end. There he wrote: "...especially since in the past I have been mildly demonized by Boycott Novell myself."

Both Byfield and the people behind BoycottNovell concern themselves with FOSS, hence my decision to comment on the article.

There is no problem with a writer seeking to attack somebody who has disagreed with him in print, online or in any other medium. When journalists indulge in such things, they state the reason for the attack right at the start of their diatribe. (Here's a classic example.) They do not seek to mask it behind a lot of verbiage and pretend that they are trying to do the world a lot of good.

For those who are not aware of the background, BoycottNovell was set up in the wake of the deal which Novell signed with Microsoft in November 2006.

As the name implies, the people behind the site, Shane Coyle and Roy Schestowitz, are opposed to the deal and initially used the site to provide material to tell people about the real nature of the deal and how it posed a danger to FOSS.

Over the (nearly) two years of its existence, BoycottNovell has morphed into a site that provides links to a huge number of articles which are of interest to those who like to read about free and open source software.

This is in addition to links to other general technology articles; Schestowitz, who does practically all the writing, concentrates on links that expose what he describes as Microsoft's real agenda and Novell's increasing dissociation from the FOSS world in general.

Byfield's bid to pretend he is taking an objective look at the BoycottNovell site, when he has had a long-running feud with Schestowitz, is deception at its best and finest.

For one, Schestowitz has got his own system of ranking FOSS writers on a so-called credibility index and Byfield has, in the past, taken a swing at this list, probably because he isn't ranked very highly.