Copygate update: eWeek freetard hack spanked by Ziff-Davis colleague


Not for being a lazy copycat who lifts press releases word for word, — a fact first revealed by the FSJ Spotlight Team last week — but simply for being a biased, unreliable freetard. See this piece by Microsoft fanboy Joe Wilcox where he tears Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste a new one for intentionally misreporting the results of a Linux Foundation survey to make it seem like Linux is taking over the world when in fact, um, it’s not.

But the real bonus here is that SJVN is still up to his copycat ways, though he’s making a little more effort to cover his tracks. Like, now when he lifts entire paragraphs he puts quote marks around them. For example in his latest story he lifts a paragraph from a Linux Foundation guy’s blog and puts it in quotes to make it look like he interviewed the guy. Giveaway is that the Linux Foundation guy made a dumb mistake — he used the word “import” on his blog when he meant to say “important” — and the goof survives, intact, in Steven J.’s article.

Does this guy even bother to read the stuff when he’s stealing it? Hilarious! Check it out:

From Linux Foundation blog:

These responses definitely came from an “enterprise deployment” perspective. When IT decision makers and system administrators listed the issues with deploying pre-installed Linux offerings, they indicated that freedom trumps convenience. When deploying corporate desktop systems, the administrators want the freedom in defining settings and configuration options. The choice of Linux distribution is import [boldface mine, ed.] as well. IT organizations do not want to be locked into the Linux distribution vendor that is pre-installed on the hardware they have selected.

From the version published by Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste:

Cherry added, “These responses definitely came from an ‘enterprise deployment’ perspective. When IT decision makers and system administrators listed the issues with deploying preinstalled Linux offerings, they indicated that freedom trumps convenience. When deploying corporate desktop systems, the administrators want the freedom in defining settings and configuration options. The choice of Linux distribution is import [doh! ed.] as well. IT organizations do not want to be locked into the Linux distribution vendor that is preinstalled on the hardware they have selected.”

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is the chairman of the Internet Press Guild, a journalism watchdog group. I am not making this up. Much love to dear reader Tim for alerting us to this latest outrage. And to Jason for the artwork. And to the brave editors and management of eWeek and Ziff-Davis for leaving this guy in his job and providing this ongoing stream of achingly funny entertainment. Great work, eWeek editors. Your high standards and commitment to integrity are an inspiration to us all.