Fake Steve Jobs is just a frigtard after all
Daniel Lyons, Frigtard
(Credit: Forbes.com)Brad Stone of The New York Times just outed the Fake Steve Jobs and it's none other than open-source software lover (Not!) Daniel Lyons of Forbes. The Great Faker Himself has admitted it..
And now there's nothing left to read with childlike wonder. Especially the wonder of how anyone could write with such acerbic bite about people that Lyons will interact with each day.
20/20 hindsight points to Lyons, who has never had much in the way of praise for open source. (One of Fake Steve's favorite targets were the incorrigible "freetards.") But I never would have guessed it, even despite him suggesting that:
I'm stunned that it's taken this long. I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I've been sort of waiting for this call for months.
I guess the big question now is whether Lyons will feel any compulsion to apologize for some of the nasty things he wrote about people under his pseudonym. I would guess not, but he should. We don't need the vitriol that he dished out. It's better when people feel responsible for what they say, rather than being able to hide behind anonymity. As Joel [on Software] suggests:
When a blog allows comments right below the writer's post, what you get is a bunch of interesting ideas, carefully constructed, followed by a long spew of noise, filth, and anonymous rubbish that nobody ... nobody ... would say out loud if they had to take ownership of their words....It's not fun, freewheeling freedom of expression, yay first amendment!. It's mostly anonymous hate speech.
If you maintain a blog, you know this is true. Anonymity may be good in some contexts, but in blogs it leads to lowest-common denominator language, tone, and content.
I've always liked Lyons' coverage of open source. I like the fact that he's not a fanboy. He asks some tough questions. At times he's pitifully wrong:
This is what open source software is all about: creating knockoffs and giving them away, destroying the value of whatever the other guy is selling.
But even then he's asking the right questions, challenging the right platitudes, etc.
I won't miss Fake Steve. I will look forward to reading Daniel Lyons. I disagree with him often, but when he writes under his real name, at least his venom is somewhat tempered by things like facts, journalism, and what-not. Fake Steve? Not so much.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
