James Gosling points out what it means to speak in the age of blogs - you're always on the record:

I need to stop talking to reporters. It's so easy for what results to get misunderstood. I was not trying to say that all open source projects are chaotic: there is a spectrum. Apache is at the very high end of the scale, on average exhibiting excellent behaviour. Their governence rules are very effective. Apache and the Linux kernel set the Gold Standard. But they aren't all of the open source universe, and there's some decidedly oddball behaviour that goes on. The problem is that it's often the crazy behavior that becomes publicly visible and it tarnishes everything. When I made the comment that got so misunderstood I was talking about the perception of the open source community by outsiders.

It wasn't really the reporters who made this story though - it was when it hit slashdot and the blogosphere - at which point, Gosling had to issue a "what I meant to say, was" kind of statement.

The funny thing is, this sort of thing is giving me more sympathy for politicians and other public figures. They've been in the "always on" bubble for quite some time now, and the media has been playing "gotcha" with them for years. That whole game is moving down the scale. It's not as if the same number of people care, but it's every bit as damaging for the niche audience that does...