Now that trackbacks from this site are visible in our comments stream (yes, I’ve installed yet another commenting system — more on that in a future post) I’m noticing a lot of incoming links from something called Boycott Novell. Today, I humbly ask for your help in figuring out whether or not this is what the cool kids are apparently calling “sping”.

Sping is a term for trackbacks to a blog containing mostly spam. Ordinarily I would be as thrilled as any other blogger to be linked to from far and wide across the web, but what Boycott Novell is linking to here has little if anything to do with their stated mandate:

Exploring the reality behind exclusionary deals with Microsoft and their subtle (yet severe) implications.

Granted, the links are being posted on the news roundup section of their site. Yet that page (like all the others) is firmly under the control of the author’s agenda.

And who is the person behind Boycott Novell? It’s Roy Schestowitz, and he was interviewed on FLOSS weekly late last year. I endured the hour-plus interview yesterday and it wasn’t easy — Mr. Schestowitz didn’t really answer anything to my satisfaction — in fact, at the end of the interview he even went so far as to say that the questions weren’t put to him in a way that he could answer. It must have been a supremely frustrating experience for interviewer Jono Bacon; he certainly conducted himself with more patience and professionalism than I would have been able to muster, given the circumstances.

To call someone a spammer/splogger (spinger?) is a serious allegation, I know — but there’s other evidence supporting this claim. Verofakto’s blog reports at least six accounts on link sharing sites all operated by the same user, and all sharing the same obsession with anti-Novell/Microsoft news.

Schestowitz and his site have become so infamous as to inspire a site called Boycott “Boycott Novell”.

Now I’m obviously no fan of Microsoft, but I’m wondering if I should delete these Boycott Novell trackbacks, or is there some other piece of the puzzle that I’m missing here?