LCA2009: Visa denial claims prove to be a beat-up

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 14 January 2009 05:05

Opinion and Analysis

People in the free and open source software community are often quick to leap on journalists and label offerings by the latter as beat-ups.
I wonder what the collective reaction will be to one of their own who set off alarm bells with a claim about being denied a visa to enter Australia.

Kaj Arno, MySQL community organiser, made a claim in his blog yesterday that several Sun Microsystems employees had been denied short business stay visas in Australia and that the MySQL presence at Australia's national Linux conference would suffer as  aresult.

The way he put it, it looked as though he himself had been affected: "...I’ve experienced what I had expected the least," he wrote, after a long bleat about how open source is not restricted by borders.

"Several Sun Microsystems Inc employees, especially related to the Database Group, have been denied short stay business visas to Australia, over the last few months, as they have been seen to be competing with local Australian businesses unfairly."

I've been in touch with two senior Sun people to fix up meetings with them during the conference and neither of them has had any problem about getting a visa - else I'm sure they would have not committed to meeting me.

Arno's post, which hinted at some dark conspiracy, inspired "open source blogger" Sarah Stokely to question the attitude of Australian immigration officials; "Australia denies visas over concerns about open source? WTF?" she headlined a post, without bothering to check with anyone about the veracity of Arno's claim.

The same Stokely is set down to speak at LCA2009 on the topic "It's all fun and games until someone wants to sue you: reporting in the age of citizen journalism." Now that's a talk that one would really be able to take seriously.

Arno issued an update/clarification (don't they all!!!) later. And what a clarification it was.

He admitted he had not been denied a visa. He admitted he had used the word "several" when he had meant two. In short, he had jumped the gun and shot his mouth off.

There were various other clarifications too, too many to mention.

This is not the first time that such claims have been made. In 2003, a person who posed as a KDE developer claimed he had been mistreated at Australian immigration when he arrived to attend the LCA which was held in Perth that year.

It turned out to be a troll but the American technology news website Slashdot allowed several posts about it without verifying whether there was any substance to the individual's claims. That's "open source journalism", I guess.