Steinman's Mea Culpa
- Shane Coyle
- 2007-03-21 21:18:52 UTC
- Modified: 2007-03-21 21:24:11 UTC
Novell's PR Blog has a
guest entry from Justin Steinman, in which he explains that he was indeed in error when he made those
disputed statements regarding Novell's financial support of the Free Software Foundation:
Further research inside Novell confirms that Peter Brown is correct and I spoke in error. I want to make it clear that I had no intention of making false claims or providing misinformation to the market. I simply said what I believed to be true. Now that I have learned my statement is not true, I want to correct that error.
Thus, I want to apologize to the Free Software Foundation and to the open source community for making this misrepresentation. I should have double-checked the accuracy of my information before speaking, and for that, I offer no excuse.
Since I get corrected around here all the time, I am certainly willing to believe there was no malice here - a simple error, and we move on...
Comments
Roy Schestowitz
2007-03-21 21:24:23
http://weblog.infoworld.com/openresource/archives/2007/03/the_problem_wit.html [ The problem with pretending (Novell claims support for FSF) ]
Waltham
2007-03-23 13:19:39
It's this sort of amateurish behavior that damages the reputation of marketing professionals.
IMQ
2007-03-23 15:25:51
Furthermore, anyone in a position to speak on the company behave should do his/her homework carefully before making any kind of statement that could be seen as misinformation.
shane
2007-03-23 16:00:22
If Novell relieved him of his duties, I would not be surprised, but I didn't get the feeling that he was consciously misrepresenting Novell's support of the FSF; I got the feeling that he just assumed that it was still the case that Novell was a patron, he had old info but didn't just dream it up completely.
Then again, I don't know if $5,000 could be considered "significant" contributions for a corporation the size of Novell, but he's a marketing guy.