Anatomy of an attack

Paul Murphy wrote an excellent article about the anti-Solaris article that even found it´s syndication at the NYT. Paul writes in Anatomy of an attack: The New York Times on Solaris:

The piece itself illustrates the standard recipe for attack journalism: use a title sure to attract the attention of editors sympathetic to your cause; pretend to balance in the article but actually use strong negatives and weak positives; find one or two third parties to attribute the really nasty stuff to; and, strip any facts you need of their real context while leveraging reader assumptions to add an emotional patina of your own. Thus using “Sun Solaris” in the title instead instead of just “Solaris” or “OpenSolaris” invokes one of the not so secret handshakes characteristic of the anti-Sun community to grab the attention of any editor with a Microsoft or IBM agenda.

It´s an really interesting analysis of the article. I really thing that we will see more attacks in the future as Opensolaris get a more and more viable alternative to Linux in many “linux-only” shops. Paul ask at the end of it´s article. “Qui bono”. I don´t know … wait … of course i know it, but i can´t pinpoint the exact source. But i´m sure of more attacks of this kind. There is a market share to loose.