You've probably seen his name mentioned on Slashdot and Groklaw, and if you regularly read Linux-related news, you've probably read some of his articles and shook your head in disbelief. Forbes writer and fiction author Daniel Lyons' articles regularly target Linux, free software, and companies that support Linux. So who is Daniel Lyons, and what is the origin of his anti-Linux agenda? I recently tried to find out.

The runaround

Two emails had been sent to Lyons in an attempt to interview him in writing. After several days with no response, I called the Forbes office in New York and got Lyons' office number. He answered the phone immediately. After introducing myself and explaining that I was after some comments from him for NewsForge (ed. note: I decided to put this up on The Jem Report, and it did not appear on NewsForge), Lyons demanded to know my phone number. After giving it to him, Lyons asked questions about NewsForge that suggested he'd never heard of it before.

"You're writing an article all about me?" Lyons asked, laughing. I told him that I was planning on doing other interviews as well (I tried to contact Theo de Raadt for this article, but he did not respond in time for publication), but that the article may not be specifically about him.

Lyons then asked me to email him the interview questions -- he did not want to be interviewed on the phone -- so I explained that I'd already sent him two messages from two different email accounts. "I delete all email from addresses I don't know," Lyons replied.

After emailing him my list of questions for the third time, Lyons sent a reply message saying that he was unable to grant interview requests without the approval of someone else in the Forbes hierarchy. He gave me the phone number of someone in the public relations department. Unfortunately -- or perhaps purposefully -- the PR person was on a lengthy vacation and would not be back in the office until after the July 4 holiday. I did manage to contact someone else at Forbes, and finally got my interview questions in. That's when Daniel Lyons told me that he didn't want to participate in the article.

Unanswered questions

Below are the questions asked of Lyons. His behavior and refusal to comment suggests that at least one of them would have elicited a response that Daniel Lyons did not want printed.

• How would you describe the genre or category your articles fit into? Commentary? Analysis? Editorial? Or do you consider yourself strictly a journalist?
• How would you characterize your job description and professional mission statement? In other words, what do you do for Forbes? What does your editor expect to see from you? If you're a Forbes employee, why is your name absent from the Forbes.com masthead?
• Have you ever accepted any gifts, stipends, grants, or other compensation from any of the companies or products that you cover?
• Who checks the facts and sources in your articles? If you don't quote a source, where does your information come from?
• Besides Forbes.com, what other technology-related jobs have you held?
• Are you aware that Forbes.com's Web servers are powered by the GNU/Linux operating system? Would you characterize the people responsible for this decision as "losers" for choosing Linux?
• In your opinion, is GNU/Linux and free (as in rights, not price) software an enemy of business?
• Have you ever used GNU/Linux at length? If so, what distribution was it?
• Can you think of one positive thing to say about the GNU/Linux operating system? If so, what is it?
• Do you consider yourself to be anti-Linux?
• Do you live in fear of retaliation or other real harm by Linux or free software enthusiasts because of your articles? If so, why -- in your opinion -- are people so upset by your writing?

Since Daniel Lyons would not answer these questions, perhaps you, the reader, can fill in the blanks for him. Why was Lyons so afraid of these questions?

Dulling the predator's fangs

Daniel Lyons will no doubt continue to negatively spin all things Linux-related. But in giving me the runaround, he has inadvertently given us all an excellent strategy for reducing his effectiveness: refusing to participate in interviews. If Lyons contacts you for an interview, send him a link to this article. Or for fun, you might give him the runaround first -- route him to your PR department.

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Copyright 2005 Jem Matzan. Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article are permitted without royalty in any medium provided this notice is preserved.