Ubuntu ZA - Ubuntu South Africa LoCo

For those who didn't know, I started working for a company called Nomanini at the beginning of last year. Nomanini manufactures an airtime point of sale terminal for use in the informal sector (taxis, spaza shops, etc).

I'm excited to say that my boss will be speaking at ScaleConf 2013, which kicks off tomorrow, and myself and my colleagues are going to be there too. See you there!

Many of you know that I am the project leader of an open source worship presentation program called OpenLP. Yesterday evening, as I was doing something on OpenLP's project page on SourceForge.net (a popular repository for open source projects), I glanced at the reviews page and the one below caught my eye.

Now, I don't normally worry about negative reviews (they lend your project a certain amount of authenticity), I couldn't help but notice the reference AND link to a commercial product. I then simply did a search for the reviewer on Google and one of the first few hits was the reviewer's blog. I went to the About page, and sure enough, not only was it the same person, I found out some interesting facts about him.

Establishing that the blog did indeed belong to the reviewer was easy. Firstly, the reviewer didn't even bother to use a different photo for his profile on SF.net, and secondly his domain name, Twitter account and SF.net username were all identical. Lastly, the product he was promoting over OpenLP was the very same product he is the executive director (or somesuch inflated title) of.

I just couldn't believe my eyes. Here is what I would presume is an upstanding Christian man, and he directly slates a competitor's product without so much as disclosing who he is. I don't go around telling everyone how awful EasyWorship, ProPresenter and MediaShout are. It just is not something you do. If your product is better than the others then let it speak for itself.

This reminds me of Microsoft a few years ago who didn't know how to handle open source software, so they paid people to conduct absurd studies to prove how great they were.

Seriously, are you so scared of OpenLP that you have to pretend to be an unhappy user? I highly doubt you've ever even downloaded OpenLP, nevermind actually used it.

Incidentally, I marked his comment as spam, so it is no longer visible.