The rise of the FOSS spinmeister
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.
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.
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.
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