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I'm writing this in my spare time, as a private individual...
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... with a direct and substantial financial interest in discrediting the competition. And if you were to let people know about your direct and substantial financial interest up front you would have less credibility when doing it.
Who it is who pays for your LWN subscription, and whether it happens to be during business hours or not is completely beside the point.
And when such clear conflict of interest exists, it *is* customary to declare such.
Posted Jul 31, 2009 0:47 UTC (Fri) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322)
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Well it certainly is customary to declare a pecuniary interest upfront, but I would not have thought that diminished one's credibility. Indeed it has been most enlightening on occasion when, for instance, openly-declared vmware hackers have weighed in on the subject of virtual machine internals in the context of a discussion of several competing free vm implementations.