Deconstructing BoycottNovell: Steve Jobs is a disgusting person

Following last week’s analysis of a BoycottNovell (a.k.a “TechRights”) article by Dr. Roy Schestowitz, PhD, I’d like to take the opportunity to score a double here, because I can’t help myself and seem to have too much free time on my hands lately (although I’m not lucky enough to be a professional student with 14 hours/day to burn). This one is interesting because it shows not only the pointlessness of the vast majority of the author’s vaunted 11 gazillion posts, but also a bit of the systemic hypocrisy that permeates most everything he publishes.

The article in question today is very dramatically (as always) entitled Apple’s CEO Leaves Just as Apple Probed for Monopoly Abuse. As usual I’ll go through it in roughly paragraph order.

We begin with this (note the original links are left intact in the quotes):

The announcement about Steve Jobs’ departure did not interest us immediately because just about every site covered it and mimicked Wikipedia’s pagefest with a mug of some allegedly heroic figure.

Yay! “I am not angry”, sez Dr. Roy constantly. And oh merciful god Wikipedia has a photograph or two of Steve Jobs? Good god, someone call Jimmy Wales and demand it be replaced with a picture of… Jimmy Wales? Hmm. Better not.

And who is “Us” again? I see no one but Dr. Roy posting on that blog. Anyway:

Fab, an Apple sceptic, put it like this:

Gratuitous and empty “there are people out there who agree with me” filler.

People who lurk in this site and are longtime Apple customers tell us that Steve Jobs is a disgusting person and has always been a disgusting person […]

This is absolutely hilarious, because I’m sure that these alleged Apple customers who “lurk” in BoycottNovell are close friends of Steve Jobs. Note also that it’s OK to quote “longtime Apple customers”, assuming they exist, but for example Dr. Roy playfully (or to use his favorite term, politely) calls Matt Asay “Mac Asay” because he  owns a Macintosh or something like that. Except that he writes [sic] after intentionally misspelling it, so it’s perfectly OK!

so his departure from Apple can generally be beneficial to computer users’ rights, even freedom

Yes, the first thing Apple is going to do after Jobs leaves is to remove all DRM from their OS and devices, and then tear down their app store.

People must remember that Jobs — like Gates — is surrounded by PR people.

No shit?

As one news site rightly points out, details are unknown about this departure

“Rightly”? What does that even mean? Starting to see a pattern here? This is all filler, nothing more.

and the relevance to Microsoft and Linux was explained by Wayne Borean:

Wayne Borean is another one of Dr. Roy’s friends. Or had you heard about Wayne Borean before today? The reference is presented as if it was written by a respected journalist at the Financial Times or the Boston Globe. This is a common pattern at BoycottNovell -- presenting “sources” as independent entities that just happen to write about the same things with the same slant all the time. Beware of links to GatesKeepers, The Source, No-Mono, OpenBytes, Pogson, etc. These are all his friends’ blogs -- a.k.a the Munchkin Network.

Oh and Wayne Borean is clearly not reading my blog, otherwise he’d know that Dr. Roy pretty much despises Linus Torvalds. Oh well.

We particularly liked Ghabuntu’s take on it:

Oh, I’m sure “they” liked Ghabuntu’s take on it, since the only thing Ghabuntu does on twitter is repeat Dr. Roy’s spam from identi.ca. Again, the Munchkin Network. And I love the part where the Google founders are compared to Steve Jobs. Why not compare Jobs to Google’s CEO? Oh that’s right, he used to work at Novell. Oops.

Well, we have a little theory about Jobs’ departure.

The beauty of BoycottNovell is that this theory will be tomorrow’s fact. Isn’t GNU/Evangelism great?

He could probably put that off for a bit, but let us talk about timing and note that Europe has opened a probe into Apple’s practices:

Dr. Roy is privy to Steve Job’s medical condition, so he knows that it could have been “put off for a bit”. His informers, who are close friends of Steve Jobs and informed him as to the man’s disgustness [sic], probably rendered an expert clinical opinion as well. Sweet, huh?

Vincent Van Quickenborne also lobbied for ludicrous laws that help Microsoft, sometimes while citing Microsoft lobbyists from ACT […] This man cannot be trusted and Free software proponents in Belgium do not like him because his policies help Microsoft a lot of the time.

This is amusing – this guy is apparently one of the Evil Ones, but it’s fantastic that he opened an antitrust probe of crApple, as the company is called in Dr. Roy’s chat room. Who cares about obvious contradictions with the BoycottNovell Bible when there’s a perfectly good blog posting to be made to fill the day’s quota? Consistency? Pfft.

Oh, and when the EU opens a probe of IBM’s airtight mainframe monopoly, Dr. Roy goes positively apeshit. But when they investigate Microsoft or Apple, it’s high-fives all around. Hypocrisy is a terrible thing.

Speaking of hypePads, they lead to lawsuits

First off, a lawsuit is an entirely different thing. Isn’t it strange that someone who claims to be an expert on legal issues would use that term incorrectly?

Second, why even bring this up? The charges are against two individuals that breached AT&T’s network to retrieve personal data about users, which just happened to be “hypePad” customers. Better still, they were charged because they notified AT&T of the hole in their infrastructure. This might as well have been people with Android phones on the Verizon network, and is at best tangential to the device itself. Truthyness in advocacy, from the guy that warns us about people who surround themselves with PR people. Or maybe just more filler, who knows.

But you knew all this, because you don’t get your news from BoycottNovell or BoycottBoy [sic], right?

[sic]