Thank you

I feel ever so embarassed that the smart people who run boycottnovell.com have unmasked my evil schemes and my henchmen. Please forgive me.

As a token of my good will, I’d like to tell Roy that he is actually working for me, too. It hasn’t been on purpose, of course, poor Roy; you have been acting under the power of a post-hypnotic command. I am ever so sorry, Roy! Now, let me free you with a snip of my fingers… *snip!*

And also Roy, you are, in reality, my illegitimate son.

Note: comment has been flagged for arriving from an incarnation of a known (eet), pseudonymous, forever-nymshifting, abusive Internet troll that posts from open proxies and relays around the world.

I think people would make less of your associations if you didn’t harp on about association constantly.

As you say, it’s a cheap attack, so hopefully we won’t be seeing attacks by association in the future.

If they didn’t use that to discredit the messenger, they would find something else. That’s their nature.

Most people would not want to put who they work for on their personal `blog’ – for the express reason that it may imply some sort of official/company position. How you could claim that everyone would normally show their employer on their `blog’ is pretty strange. There is a difference between ‘I work for a company and get paid to blog to support their position in secret’, and ‘I work for a company and love my job and like to talk about all the great stuff I am/we are doing, as well as movies/food/friends/etc’.

To claim that you didn’t know Jeff was an employee of Novell does suggest you should do some more research. Jeff has been involved in Ximian/Novell almost as long as Miguel has. And not only that, has likewise been very open and very public about it – posting thousands of e-mails on public lists over the last 8 years for example. I also know him personally and worked with him for several years and think he’s a pretty decent bloke who is I know is completely dedicated to free software, and I feel somewhat offended that you are attacking him (and others, such as Miguel – disagree yes, but why attack?).

I, like others, know you do a lot of jumping to quick conclusions on often poorly researched facts, but tend to forgive you because also coalesce a lot of interesting links and opinion and seem to hold a position on a number of issues that I generally agree with. However, I do wish you’d stop these personal attacks – all they do is upset people who are more complex than you make them out to be. Groklaw has a habit of doing it too, although PJ has a much more annoying ‘holier than thou’ attitude which i’m fed up with. Such attacks don’t add any value to this otherwise useful site.

It is nice to see you apologise, but certainly in this case it wouldn’t have taken much research to never have needed to in the first place.

Michael Zucchi

In all fairness though, and as some people here have commented, it’s difficult for you to counteract accusations of culpability by association, just as it is difficult to ask people not to rush to judgments based solely on perception, because you unfortunately do that a lot, too.

I apologize if that came across as a personal attack. It wasn’t intended as such at all. I know for a fact you do not remove comments, but if you want, please delete or blank out mine.

I just think it’s a shame that the “Roy has friends that game websites with 14+ accounts” line has now become a sort of punch line for some people.

Beware of ‘twitter’, puppet master, nym extraordinaire and legendary Slashdot troll who hangs out on #boycottnovell and does righteous battle with the evil “M$”.

http://slashdot.org/~willyhill/journal/205317

With friends like these…

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&num=50&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=site:boycottnovell.com+byfield