Another victim of his blog
This story didn’t appear on the page one of the New York Times, but the open source world did notice it. Russ Nelson, who replaced Eric Raymond as president of the Open Source Initiative, resigned because of a post published on his blog, “Blacks are lazy,” which was seen as racist by the community. Of course, in our ‘politically correct’ world, this note was seen as a big gaffe. Here is a link to an article from eWEEK, “New OSI President Steps Down.”
Russ Nelson tried to justify his original post by explaining that he just meant black people working less hard because of the lower salaries they get. But it was too late and not enough, and he had to resign.
You’ll find his explanations on his blog in “Resigning from OSI Presidency.”
You also can read his original post from February 7, 2005, but updated with this new title, “Blacks are not lazy.”
Finally, under this simple title, “Withdrawn,” Nelson explains once more that his note was not well written and “apologizes to anybody who thought that the posting itself was racist.” And in order for these explanations to move out of the normal flow of other postings, he dated this post as being written of January 1, 2001. Strange tactic…
As I already wrote it, your blog is one of your self-promotion tools. But you are entirely responsible for its contents. So read several times the notes you write before pushing the “Publish” button…
