Pardon my anonymity, but it's necessesary for this post. In some ways it should have been posted to SOPW or possibly to PM Discussion, but there's really not a lot anyone can do but throw away sympathy votes on an anonymous post.

I have to be careful what I say as I discovered that all of my posts here are part of a file my employer is keeping on me. Now I'm not completely against employers monitoring employee activity while on the job; I understand it to some extent. But when all of my online activity no matter where it originates from is collected and analyzed for "Intellectual Property" violations I feel obliged to give a warning shout.

Now the reason for this 'collection' is what will upset most of you. It is because I advocate Open Source. When I was hired my employer seemed to endlessly inquire what and how I aquired and maintained such a wide understanding of technology from networking to OS's to hardware and programming without any formal education. I spent the first year and a half showing how I gained my skills through the many net resources, and became the 'Open Source' poster boy for the Corp.

Then this year something changed. Open Source has become a bad word and I can't get near any of the 'interesting' pieces of any projects. The ostrisizm (I'm too bummed out to fix spelling errors) is palpable. Finally today someone from outside my department had me go for a ride with him at lunch. He described a high level meeting where it was literally decided that Open Source was a threat to the Corps intellectual property, and that even internal user groups need extra security monitoring, and that the internal culture needed to reflect this level of security.

What is truley ironic is the real reason I am/was/have been an Open Source advocate was because it allowed me to grow in this profession without having to resort to stealing software -- my ethics just are not comfortable with that (Hell I've even registered winzip).

And they think I'm a threat!

In reply to McCarthyism, Open Source & PM by Anonymous Monk

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