Bonum Certa Men Certa

Response to Red Hat FUD from Canonical's COO Matt Asay

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Summary: A dissection of unfounded suggestions that Red Hat will lose its independence because Novell is dying

IT is no secret that we distrust Matt Asay, who currently links to fluff from Microsoft's shill Eric Savitz. Based on this shill, he then assumes that Novell's serious troubles as of late [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] are likely to spell doom for Red Hat as an independent company. But these are totally unrelated events; if anything, Novell dissipating would give more room for Red Hat to expand, not to be acquired. Asay is a very clever guy, so why does he spread such FUD about Red Hat? One possibility that crossed our minds is that such hasty/hopeful/awful predictions would work well for the company he helps manage now, namely Canonical. What's with his recent headline that says (with a question mark, as usual), "When will Microsoft sue Google over Linux?" Such a headline is not helpful and it sometimes seems like he just wants traffic with headlines like these.



“Asay is a very clever guy, so why does he spread such FUD about Red Hat?”Our reader Brandon says that it sounds like Asay is "a conspiracy theorist now" (because of the speculative, provocative headlines). But anyway, the criticism in general ought to be tied to other things. Asay is also routinely citing lobbyists for software patents (maybe unknowingly) and sucking up to Gartner, which is corrupt and better off ignored. You needn't play nice with crooks like Gartner, you should expose them instead.

We apologise for not being fans of Canonical's current COO, but why lie or keep silent about it? In the forums we refer to him as "Mac Asay" because of his love for Apple, which is currently his competitor. Is this behaviour (from the news) the type of thing that GNU/Linux should be imitating?

Reader: Steve Jobs says no tethering between iPad and iPhone



Steve Jobs appears to have fired off a tersely worded email reply to a user in Sweden who asked whether the WiFi-only iPad could be tethered to the iPhone: "No."


Apple retards its own products and does not listen to users, as usual.

Put together with Apple's lawsuit against GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], Apple should be abandoned, not taken as an example. Apple is a niche product for spree-happy people with more taste for GUIs, not technical merit that includes powerful file systems, centralised software management, and frequent updates. Bar marketing, Ubuntu beats Mac OS X in many areas. Making GNU/Linux "more like the Mac" (even with a new default theme that begs to suggest so) will give GNU/Linux the reputation of "cheap Windows/Mac" and that's not a way to win the market's respect.

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