| Hmm, how about journalists who write articles about companies that buy advertisments in newspapers they work for? Are journalists allowed to write bad things about advertaisers? There are other topics they can choose or switch job... I can't belive that Google is sponsoring Code Club totally without any gains (positive PR, for instance), so that's kind of mutual relation between Code Club and Google. If Code Club starts promoting coding worst practices (say, let's use always static methods in Java) I would expect that Google, as a partner/sponsor, would react. Google provides a lot of valuable services, but they have also some questionable practices, I don't see any reason why someone cannot speak about them. I guess she wasn't spreading lies about Google or offending Google or Google employees, etc. so why the "gag order". Constructive criticism should be welcomed, especially in the strongly "meritocratic" circles. "put the organisation ahead of your personal issues/complaints" way of thinking can be really dangerous because it allows to justify evil - "because organisation/my boss" said to do X or Y I can put aside by belives and opinions. That's start from cheating older people to buy expensive phone plans or cable TV subscriptions ($1 a month only... for first 3 months out of 24). Then we can justify bankers talking people into bad investments. Then we can justify selling drugs that does not help anyone (but the company invested $XXXXXXXX, so the product must go to pharmacies). |