"Whitepaper" is a fancy word for an advertisement disguised as well-formatted document. All sorts of Web sites like The Register rely on 'injecting' such fancy advertisements into search engines, or at least some unsuspecting readers. Articles are written to bring attention to whitepapers and the bias of these articles matters too.

“Why would people want to pay Microsoft 'patent tax' for a product that they already use without this ludicrous software patents scheme?”TechRepublic has been pushing Novell "whitepapers" for quite a long time now (it does the same thing for Microsoft, but then again, TechRepublic is full of Microsoft boosters and MVPs). We used to mention this every week when it started last year, but it has gone on for several months without exceptions, so we no longer bother to bring this up. However, one reader told us earlier today: "How is google news being gamed so that "Unrivaled support from Novell, now available for Red Hat" appears every day in linux search 24 hrs?"

Yes, TechRepublic/Novell is still pushing that old whitepaper pretty much every week or every other week in RSS feeds and beyond that. This does not happen autonomously and it must be deceiving to many people. Novell is trying to poach Red Hat customers, sometimes in illegal or unethical ways. Why would people want to pay Microsoft 'patent tax' for a product that they already use without this ludicrous software patents scheme? ⬆