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The Cargo Cult of Business » IBM Speaks With Forked Tongue

IBM Speaks With Forked Tongue

Published on 3 Aug 2005 at 1:24 pm | 1 Comment | Trackback
Filed under The Cargo Cults of Business, Manifest Masquerade, Service With A Smirk, Brain Trust, Technopolitical, Business and Corporation Related, Information Technology, Open Source Software.

 It seems that bait-and-switch with promises to comply with licensing terms are the vogue these days. Although IBM has gone above and beyond the call of misdirection on this one, with a slippery slide of weaseling worthy of a certain erstwhile U.S. President.  TechTarget/Search400 covers the initial "Neener-Neener!" from IBM to its user base. You have to give these slick dogs some credit though; in spite of operating in what is clearly a crass and viciously self-serving paradigm, ol’ Big Blue was quick to backpedal when the heat started rising.

But this sort of corporate shilly-shallying is not what leads IBM to suddenly grace the pages of Cargo Cult. Infomatics (in turn webcasting VNUnet) has the 411 on the real dish in this incident: IBM was pulling a stipulated open source license. And this wasn’t a simple case of "well, we changed our minds" either, which the whole paradigm of open source is designed to prevent. No, it’s clear from just the superficial facts that Big Blue deliberately engaged in a campaign of misinformation regarding the license terms of the product. 

As noted in the Infomatics/VNUnet article, IBM slung all the right buzzwords to generate the appearance of an open source product, without ever putting their lawyers where their mouth was. Of course, it only worked because the user community was willing to buy off on the bamboo airframe IBM was putting up in lieu of specific licensing terms. But shame and shame again on IBM for such double-dealings.  And it doesn’t stop there; they’re still at it with their damage control. Per Infomatics/VNUnet, "She [Spokeswoman Kathleen McGraw] added that the vendor is looking to release the code under an Open Source licence."

"Looking to release the code." The nerve of these people! It makes you wonder how many people are going to swallow that little bone hook, line, and sinker, and think that IBM has now somehow repented of its deceptive ways and is going to play it straight. Don’t anyone believe it until you see the whites of their counsel’s eyes. If they truly recognized the wickedness of their ways, they would have thrown a gallon of midnight oil at the legal team and spat the code back out the next day under legitimate OSS paper. Instead, we get statements like this (per TechTarget): "In fact, Herring said if Perotti had brought the issue up with him directly, he would have told him that IBM was perfectly willing to support CGIDEV2 moving forward."

"Willing to support" being the operative words here. Not, "willing to make good on their stipulation of offering the tool as open source." And given IBM’s initial response to Perotti, I can’t help but take Herring’s comment with a large shaker of salt. Were I in upper management and I got wind of these goings-on, I’d start my internal war engines rolling. This is probably a bigger PR problem than IBM realizes, since thanks to the Internet and the blogosphere, their ability to just erase their deceptive marketing is severely limited. That being the case, as an IBM Xzec I’d want to get all my open source circles closed poste haste, immediately issuing a press release that IBM was reviewing all products currently marketed as open source to make sure that attendant OSS licensing was in place. And then, by God, I’d make sure it happened.

It’s our mission here at Cargo Cult to expose twisted memetic engineering, and IBM’s behavior in this case nearly makes it a poster child for how to hoodwink a user community. We can still hope that the upper ranks of IBM will take a dim view of this incident and work to restore Big Blue’s reputation for forthrightness and diligence with all things open source, especially given their prominence with Linux based products.  Obviously, I’m hoping that my own obscure blog entry in some way helps effect this. But until IBM gets their licenses back on their sleeve where they belong, anyone dealing with them in the area of open source development should upgrade their memetic firewall code accordingly. And for all the other engineers out there, "show me the license" should become watchwords.

-- Paul
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One Response to “IBM Speaks With Forked Tongue”

  1. Comment from Paul

    Some errata and updates. First, VNUnet is the originator of the information I had incorrectly prime-sourced as being from Infomatics. Second, Search400 is actually a sub-service of TechTarget, which relationship I had missed (doh!). Please accept errata (applied to article) and apologies for those misfires. Third, I’ll note here TechTarget’s original article on the CGIDEV02 about-face. And last but not least, the story has been picked up by Cnet, wherefrom I got my clueing about my insufficient citations.

    As for IBM, they can run, but they can’t hide. :-)

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