It appears that some mistakes will live on in Internet infamy no matter how many times you try to apologize and correct them.  Red Hat’s Vice President of Open Source Affairs and president of the OSI Michael Tiemann posted an piece on the OSI Board Blog entitled “A Question of Bias,” which features our inaccurate press release on the European Commission’s ICT Standardisation Whitepaper. 

I tried to clear things up directly with Tiemann via a comment to his blog, but it appears he’s not particularly interested in comments to his blog.  After going back more than a year, I could not find a single comment on ANY of his posts.  Since my response to Tiemann is likely sitting in comment purgatory on the OSI servers, I thought I would discuss it here.

It’s difficult to do justice to Tiemann’s wide ranging piece by summarizing it, so I recommend reading it in its entirety.  But for those without the time, here’s the short of it:

  • He read a headline of an article about our aforementioned inaccurate press release as meaning that we believe that the EC has a “bias in favor of open source” – which isn’t even a correct interpretation of the inaccurate press release, let alone our actual position.
  • Based on that he went on into an interesting discussion about how the use of selective facts, accusations of bias, and demagoguery can lead to a “stagnation of dialogue and the preservation of the status quo.”

What is so fascinating is that Tiemann succumbs to the same discursive failures that he so eloquently rails against.  As I said in my comment:

All that you say about choosing one's facts really does ring true. The tendency to ignore the evidence and selectively construct a more comfortable reality does seem to be growing all the time. Smoking and climate change are certainly big examples. Sometimes, this kind of tunnel vision isn't even intentional but it can be just as insidious.

For example, a harried association executive, involved in a very lively debate about the future of the software industry, might jump the gun on an Commission document and err in his commentary, making a critique of a white paper that turns out to be inaccurate. Even an attempt to retract the blunder is ultimately pointless because it lives on and people continue to comment on it as though it represents his opinion.

So, once this statement has a life of its own, people don't even read the original statement anymore but just just "run with it," especially if they see an opportunity for self promotion in the process. Now you have a difficult situation where you, a normally thoughtful commentator and open source advocate, writes an entire blog on the headline of an article (probably not even written by the reporter) rather than the article itself which was in turn based on a statement released in error. Thus, our (it turns out inaccurate) concern that a particular section of a document might introduce a preference in government procurement is summarized as the introduction of a procedural bias by the reporter, which is changed into an "accusation of bias" by a headline which, in turn, becomes a very inflammatory "fact." Talk about selective facts! You're right. Gosh, who wouldn't blog about that?!

The Self-Referential Hypertext Reality

Speaking of facts, another way they are distorted is through self-referential hypertext reality in blogs. All I have to do is write an inflammatory blog and now that it's on the net, everyone can reference it as "fact." I remember this well from high school debate. If you could find someone who was willing to write it down, you could cite it as "evidence" in your accelerated advocacy of a particular position. Advocacy has only become more accelerated on the web, where bloggers have even less time to check facts and advocates can spam newsgroups, blogs, and news sites with fictitious accounts of the world.

Yet, it appears that Tiemann is increasingly relying on one the Internet’s preeminent practitioners of this art: Roy Schestowitz.  While Schestowitz and I have our differences on MANY issues, I must commend his passion and creativity.  However, his research and writing leave much to be desired and should be taken with a bucket (or two) of salt.

Jeff Waugh of the GNOME Foundation explained it best to Linux.com:

“the prevailing attitudes on Boycott Novell are symptomatic of a larger situation in society "where to disagree is to be enemies, and you have to find all sorts of connections and conspiracy theories to show that the other person is bad — not merely holding a different opinion, but bad." Furthermore, he suggests the site is full of "purposeful misunderstanding" that allows it to continue publishing. "It must be a complex set of rules to adopt in your mind," Waugh says. "If Microsoft does something good, then we have to find something bad in it. And it's quite complicated to come up with a reason why a person is evil, even though they do good things."

Yet, Tiemann relied on Schestowitz not only for his attack on me, but also as “evidence” that the Gates Foundation was extorting governments on behalf of Microsoft.

Obviously, Tiemann didn’t bother to read the BoycottNovell article he linked to in the piece. Roy’s argument is that governments should stop investing in healthcare and let children die because: a lot of that money will go to pharmaceutical companies that the Gates family might be invested in (further enriching BillG), and it also might go oil companies that kill those children, er something like that.  I doubt that is an argument that Mr. Tiemann or his employers @ Red Hat and OSI want to be associated with.

Just a few other unsubstantiated accusations Roy has been spreading around the Internet:

We need to actually seek out the opinions of others with whom we disagree so that we can direct our objections to the substance of our differences rather than rely on intellectually lazy and "incurious" ad hominem attacks. I feel confident that F. Sherwood Rowland would agree.

We can only hope that in this environment, those of us concerned about "selective facts" can withstand the onslaught of questionable data even when it suits our own purposes. Otherwise, we'll all be convinced that weapons of mass destruction were actually found in Iraq. After all, it was on the "news" and reported in several blogs.