ITviikko spreading FUD?

ITviikko, one of the largest popular weekly IT publications in Finland, seems to really have a beef with open source software and anything non-microsoft.”

joker.iki.fi

I’ve noticed this too. It looks like they’re seizing every mention of every vulnerability or delay in OSS and try and make big headlines from them. If selling news is what they do, that’s somewhat understandable, but it’s not what I’d call quality journalism. To put it in perspective, the tabloids poking around every minor detail of celebrities’ lives do the same, and there are people who buy it, but I wouldn’t.

Of course, they’d probably claim they’re just trying not to be biased, when reporting vulnerabilities of both OSS and proprietary software, but I’m not too keen to read up on every tiny vulnerability of proprietary software either. What matters is the severity of the vulnerability, who is affected (all users or just some of them – this is why the Greasemonkey vulnerability wasn’t big news IMO) and how soon can it be fixed.

By these standards I believe the number of newsworthy OSS vulnerabilities would be significantly lower than it would be for example for Microsoft, as opposed to them being equal. If this is true, having equal coverage for them actually means the news source is biased.

CategoriesUncategorizedTags