Ben is a great guy. For the 8^th consecutive year, he offers a Session Database for IBMs Lotusphere conference. IBM has no comparable offer to it and even linked prominently to it from it’s Lotusphere site.

After the conference, he added LINKS to the blogs and homepages of several speakers, where they uploaded their updated slides and code examples, providing even more value by linking to freely available information on the web.

Today, Ben was asked by IBM to stop including the LINKS in his database, as IBM wants to control and limit the distribution of such content. Remember, all that Ben did was include a LINK, not the slides and code examples, into his database.

Clueless legal morons is all that comes to my mind. These are probably the same clueless lawyers, that put the disclaimers on almost any slide during the Lotusphere 2008 General Opening Session:

Ben, if I were you, I would „ask” IBM to not link to your database any more. I also wonder why the links in Ben Poole’s Lotusphere 2006 wiki didn’t trigger the same response back then.

Let me emphasize once again: Ben did not put the PDFs of the slides, which are available on the Lotusphere 2008 Website for attendees into his database. All he did was add some links to publicly available websites – much like Google. And IBM does not want that.

Maybe IBMs own „marketing f*cktard” ;) can fix this problem.

And the funny thing is, someone else has allready done, what IBM tried to prevent and Ben never intended to do: all the slides are for free on the web.

So to all the clueless legal morons at IBM: The least you have to do now is to give a big, public apology to Ben. Pronto, if you don’t want to permanently damage IBMs reputation among it’s most loyal customer base!

Tagged as: ibm, lotusnotes, lotusphere, lotusphere2008, rant | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Donnerstag, 20080131, 01:06 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)