Gossip and reputations are all public now – so you better get it right!
The open source community is a pretty open and pretty tight knit community. Not only do most people know most the other people, but there's a lot of open and public information about people from their own blogs to LinkedIn to Facebook to lots of media coverage. So when I read this quote in the Register, I had to laugh:
The hapless Danese Cooper, an OSI board member and Intel employee, did her best, during the LinuxWorld panel, to avoid adding any substance to the discussion. So desperate for attention that she knits during panels, Cooper shrugged off the OSI criticism, saying that GPLv3 is in fact making its way through OSI's approval process just fine.
The guy obviously does not know Danese – hapless is not a word I would normally combine with Danese Cooper. But even if he didn't know her, he could have found out a lot about her and her personality simply by Googling her, so not only does he look clueless, he looks incompetent too.
In today's world, there's no excuse for not getting your gossip or reputation slandering accurate. It's all there on the web.
(Danese blogged about her knitting. Personally I think people are paying a lot more attention when they are knitting than when they are staring at their computer screens …)
