[olug] Linux help

[T. J. Brumfield]

This is a little bit off-topic, however all these paranoid notions of
Google are ill-founded.

When Bush was asking for search data on all users, AOL, Microsoft and
Yahoo handed it over without court orders. Google said they would
fight to protect their users' privacy.

Google handed over private data on a user ONCE and that was in Brazil
after multiple court orders, and that was only to hand over data on a
kiddie porn ring. Honestly, handing over data on a kiddie porn ring is
decidedly un-evil.

Google treats their employees better than any company on the planet.
Again, decidedly un-evil, and I think it speaks well to the true
nature of Google management, and how they feel about their customers.
Most companies speak publicly about caring about their customers, but
treat their employees like dirt.

Google has had a fantastic charity arm from day 1, as opposed to a man
like Gates who was very anti-charity for ages, and his current charity
organization has been accused of doing more harm than good (investing
in evil companies, and only spending the bare minimum required by law
on charitable activities). Google also leverages their technology and
standing to try and do good, even when they aren't investing money in
charity, such as using their massive data-farms to predict trends and
distribute information on disease, etc.

Google spends money hiring developers like Andrew Morton and then
gives them free reign to work on the Linux kernel.

Google runs the Summer of Code.

They also donate code to other projects, such as their SQL improvements.

Google isn't a brand new company that just popped up. They've
championed for OSS and open standards. They've stood up for privacy,
and always been very open and transparent about their privacy
policies, and adjusted how long they retain data before anonymizing it
to further protect users' privacy. In the history of their company,
they have earned a good deal of goodwill, and done absolutely nothing
to earn all these paranoid accusations, but still I hear them almost
daily. Frankly, I tire of these "Google is evil" accusations. Cite
some evidence, or stop making baseless claims.

I would hope a LUG would appreciate the few allies it has in the world.

-- T. J. Brumfield

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:34 PM, Tim & Alethea
Larson<thelarsons3 at cox.net> wrote:
> Curtis LaMasters wrote:
>> Yes, but the moto is "Don't be evil" :)
>
> Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
>
>
>
>
> Tim
>
> --
> Tim & Alethea
> christtrek.org
> _______________________________________________
> OLUG mailing list
> OLUG at olug.org
> https://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
>