Summary: ZDNet caught again with its pants down as it lets familiar foes of Free software publish an 'article' to advance business agenda

WHEN Jason Perlow defended Miguel de Icaza and attacked Richard Stallman, we gave him the benefit of the doubt. His post was not appreciated by Linux Today's readership, though. The comments say it all. At ZDNet, where Microsoft employees are commenting anonymously at the request of the employer, comments are rather hostile towards Stallman, whereas in Linux Today the replies vary from blunt to more polite. Kurt, for example, wrote:

Autor is very inflammatory, as well as uniformed. Thinks that Miquel wrote GTK among other things. The article is so anti Stallman it is weird. Then the talkbacks start immediately in support of his position and begin to belittle and slam free software. I smell a rat. Why bother to link to articles like this? They are of no value.

Here is a ruder response:

As people have been questioning about Jason Perlow a few days ago when he whined about not able to be exclusive with GNU/Linux, he seems more and more to be a newly recruited Microsoft "consultant" (read "shill"), attacking FOSS at every chance.

Rainer Weikusat had his own intereresting take not only on Perlow's attitude but also about another piece of FUD from ZDNet. It received many people's attention this week for being obvious FUD and Weikusat argued that it's not FUD, just lies and marketing. Here is his message in full:

It is ZD-NET UK publishing blatant lies in order to help the business goals of Nominum, Inc, a company that is listed as official sponsor of the development of bind9 at the ISC-page available here: . https://www.isc.org/software/bind/history . That's the 'freeware DNS implementation' this guy is referring to and the very company he is working for has (also) paid ISC to develop it.

It is not unusual for ZDNet to do this. The other day we mentioned FUD against Free software which came from ZDNet's sister site, silicon.com. This FUD later spread to the various ZDNet sites too, which revealed ZDNet's real agenda or biases. People who care about news, as opposed to business agenda, should really know better. ⬆