Revenge of the Activist-Writers

“Brian Proffitt over at LinuxToday posted a rebuke of an
InfoWorld troll experiment in which a writer purposefully tried to
incite an entity known as the “Linux community” to attack him. Such
actions are unbelievably stupid by any measure of sanity, and the
Web does not need further proof that cyberspace is filled with
highly destructive, undercooked man-children who make real-life
threats over everything from books about Java to who has the better
rogue talent spec in World of Warcraft. There are so many bad
assumptions in the InfoWorld writer’s thesis–for instance, the
illusion of a single, cohesive ‘Linux community’–that I hardly
know where to start. But Brian Proffitt isn’t entirely in the
correct frame of reference either. Yes, there are a lot of violent
Linux people, and they are the dominant public face of Linux for
many technology news readers, but there is another side to this
story on the publishing end of things. Brian’s right in that he
should be more discriminating with his news picks, but I have the
feeling his job is going to get tougher as the rise of Linux blogs
and advocacy sites make it more difficult to find reliable and
authoritative Linux-oriented stories…”

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