Sorry to Say, Red Hat Involved Up to Its Fedora Brim in U.S. Government Research Deception

When I came across the misleading, disjointed MeriTalk BIg Lie progaganda press release about saving the U.S. Federal government billions by using open source, virutalization and SaaS/cloud computing, I said

• This must be some kind of front-group

• I hoped that Red Hat (RHAT) was only casually involved (through sponsorship of a related trade show).

 But it turns out enterprise-software analyst Frank Scavo dug deeper than I had and found more than a casual relationship: 

"Mystery solved. This is definitely a PR stunt. The domain name meritalk.com is registered to Liz Vandendriessche, the same person as named on the press release. A Google search on her name finds her LinkedIn profile, which lists her as a Public Relations Assistant at O'Keeffe & Company, a public relations firm.

"The website for that firm (http://www.okco.com/about-clients.asp) shows a client list with the Federal Open Source Alliance listed. "The Federal Open Source Alliance is comprised of representatives from Hewlett-Packard Corp., Intel Corp., and Red Hat, Inc."

"From the about page at http://www.federalopensourcealliance.com/#About

"The Alliance is focused on leveraging its members’ joint experiences to help Federal agencies deploy open source to meet their technology and business objectives, as well as derive the maximum value from their open source migration initiatives."

 

Thanks Frank. 

It appears Red Hat is going to try to import some European-Union-style front-group propaganda techniques into the U.S.  U.S. taxpayers, hold on to your wallets.  IT users in the U.S. government, like your father always told you, don't believe everything you read in the newspaper.

-- Dennis Byron