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> Slashdot gets by because of the moderation and meta-moderation system.

But Slashdot still only needed to delete, what? Two posts? Ever. One from Microsoft and one from the CoS, as I recall. And then wrote stories about the deletion.

> The people who are investigated don't like it and will do anything they can to shut up or discredit Groklaw.

So she has every reason to be as transparent as possible, so that they have no material to discredit Groklaw. We'll know their lies are not true because of that transparency.

> It is also important to note that there has always been open invitations at Groklaw for Darl McBride, and other targets of investigation to post their side of things.

We saw how that worked when Jay Maynard came over. He put his side of the story on http://ibmvshercules.com/

For the record, I'm of the opinion that TurboHercules has sold out to Microsoft, but that doesn't implicate Jay. He was just stuck in the middle of all this, trying to defend his friends who helped him write the Hercules emulator when they formed the TurboHercules company.

> I'm not saying Groklaw is without flaws but I am saying that the deletion of posts that are designed to discredit the site is not one of them.

It's better to fix one's faults than to delete them.

> The deleted posts lack transparency because they are almost always anonymous and they are almost always by someone pretending to be a member of the community who is not.

You lump all the anons together. Some were people who had their accounts deleted for ridiculous reasons. And then came back to help transcribe PDFs and whatnot, anyhow, after the abuse. Thing is, you don't know who they are, so you're treating them like they're all one person.

For the record, I never made an account, even though PJ asked me to once, because she thought I had good insight. But, frankly, you have no idea who the anons are, so I don't know how you can claim that they were "pretending to be a member of the community" when you have no idea who they are.

I note that you never actually consider the fact that they might be or have been members. Did you ever read AllParadox's rationale for leaving Groklaw? Or did you think he was the only such person?

> you start to sound very much like either a stupid friend of FOSS or a sly enemy.

And you start to sound like a conspiracy theorist. Not everyone is either friend or foe. I'm in favor of FOSS and against OOXML, Microsoft, software patents and deleting the posts of people who debate you instead of responding to them. I have submitted many stories to Slashdot over the years; you should be able to verify all of those statements by reading Googling those stories. I've also covered Groklaw. Before Groklaw was well-known, most of the Slashdot stories on Groklaw were written by me, personally.

Where does that leave me with respect to Groklaw? (Stupid?) friend or foe?

The whole Oracle/Sun thing was FUD.

I have just asked you on another branch of the discussion tree to clarify what problem you had with my work in that context.

You've claimed that IBM has attacked Hercules. They have not.

I've explained this in multiple comments here and you can also read the views of the maintainer of the Hercules open source project on his blog.

PJ has consistently argued in favour of people being required to respect legal licenses

That's always my position. In addition, there's antitrust law, which can be used against unreasonable conditions in license agreements imposed by dominant players. I assume you supported the EU's case against Microsoft, at least philosophically, didn't you? In that case this is the same legal concept.

Your call for IBM to be required to issue a license on a "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory basis" is an indirect attack on the restrictions of the GPL. Compulsory licensing of GPL code for closed-source software can be supported using the same flawed "logic". We don't want to go down that road again!

If z/OS were available on GPL terms, the four freedoms would take care of the legitimate interests of customers and antitrust intervention wouldn't be needed.

I can address these claims one by one.

And IBM has not violated their pledge in any way. They have not sued anyone. They have not sent a cease and desist letter to anyone.

IBM's pledge didn't say "we won't sue or send cease-and-desist letters". It was a promise not to assert the relevant patents. For the difference between "assert" and "sue", please check out this blog posting. No one forced IBM to use the broad term "assert", but they did in the original pledge, so I don't think I'm asking for too much if I expect them to comply with it.

They have not even mentioned the existence of the patents to any member of the Hercules OSS project.

Roger Bowler, the founder of TurboHercules and the person to whom IBM addressed its letters, founded the Hercules open source project in 1999.

Jay Maynard, the current maintainer of the Hercules open source project but not employed by TurboHercules (if I recall correctly), interprets this correctly as an attack on the Hercules open source project.

Apart from this, it's not even a relevant point that you try to make. IBM's pledge wasn't limited to companies in any way. It was a promise not to assert those patents "against the development, use or distribution of Open Source Software" and you can't sue bits and bytes, so obviously this includes companies. There can be no doubt about it because the pledge later makes reference to the scenario of another "party" (anyone but IBM) asserting its own patents against open source, and that passage clearly includes companies just as well.

The Wall Street Journal was right to ask: if TurboHercules doesn't qualify for the pledge, who does?

They have already taken all the action they need - they refused to license z/OS to run on it.

From a copyright perspective they can refuse, but from an antitrust point of view there can be restrictions on IPR owners and the way they exercise their rights. In my opinion this tying of z/OS to IBM-only hardware should be prohibited as tying based on the case law established in the EU in the original Microsoft antitrust case, based on the fact that IBM is no less dominant in the mainframe market than Microsoft was for desktop PC operating systems at the time of the decision.

Neither IBM, nor Google, nor any other company who has made a similar statement has said they would actively SUPPORT a project that they felt infringed on their IP. All they have said is that they would take a passive approach and not sue.

Google's chief lawyer said they won't "use" patents against open source. That is, like "assert", a far broader terminology than "sue", even though "use" and "sue" are anagrams.

In the 10+ years of it's existence, has IBM ever sent any member of the Hercules project a cease and desist letter? Have they ever actually (not in someone's imagination) threatened a lawsuit? No.

I explained above that (i) they had promised "not to assert" (as opposed to promising "not to sue"), and (ii) the TurboHercules company is a natural part of the Hercules community and ecosystem just like Red Hat and Novell's SuSE decision are for Linux, MySQL AB was for MySQL, etc. Should all those companies not have been included in IBM's pledge?

But you and a few others are trying to paint IBM's refusal to actively support a direct competitor as some sort of 'attack' on open source, and it is just plain dishonest.

Looking at how Google categorically dismisses it as "a bad idea" to use patents against open source, you can see that there are indeed people in the industry who share my view that the use of patents against open source is really bad stuff. I never claimed that they sued, I never claimed that they sent a formal cease-and-desi

But since it emulates the mainframe CPU instruction set, any software written for that CPU (z/OS as well as applications) can be emulated.

It may be able to run atop the emulator, but that's not the issue:

1. can it run adequately - doubtful - it's simply not the same hardware with the same features.
2. what is IBM's legal liability if they allow it?
3. since zOS is licensed by workload, how do you calculate the workload on an emulated system?

This is impossible.

Here's what I'd like to see:

...

2) IBM agrees to license its software on reasonable, nondiscriminatory terms on Hercules. This doesn't mean they need to support Hercules ..

This is self-contradictory. If you license it, in the clients' mind, you support it, despite any and all disclaimers (and the disclaimers probably wouldn't hold up in many courts anyways - after all, you received a consideration - money - you can't then waive your obligations).

You dissimulate here:

My primary concern about the mainframe case is the Hercules open source project, which started in 1999 and can therefore not be considered a Microsoft front by any reasonable stretch of the imagination.

... by confabulating the Hercules project and Turbo Hercules. They are not the same.

PJ didn't debunk it at all. Only her fanboys think she did.

She ignores facts and twists words, taking things out of context, just to make IBM look good in whatever it is they're doing. She did it to me repeatedly before throwing me off the site entirely.

I started my own blog to post the parts of the story that PJ ignores or twists out of any recognizable shape.

PJ's done a lot of admirable work in the IBM vs. SCO case, but her comments on other things reveal her as at least a rabid fangirl who thinks IBM can do no wrong. Her credibility is taking more of a hit because of it than she realizes.

And no, my long-time opposition to the GPL does not make me the enemy of open source software, no matter how loudly PJ may scream otherwise.

Sorry, the last sentence lost me. How does the OpenDocument Format relate to mainframe software?

The explanation is that both are interoperability matters. I've discussed it in greater detail in a blog posting but let me also give some explanation right here:

There are two interoperability issues about the way IBM treats TurboHercules and the Hercules open source project. By tying its operating system to its hardware (not allowing the use of z/OS, even if customers are willing to pay a reasonable price for it, on non-IBM hardware), IBM prevents the emulation/virtualization that Hercules is technically capable of providing. The other issue is that IBM uses patents on its mainframe CPU instruction set to bully TurboHercules and thereby effectively against the Hercules open source project as a whole, as the Hercules maintainer explains on his blog.

ODF is an interoperability matter and its interface is a document format. But the instruction set of a CPU is also an interface: it's the way the software interfaces with the CPU hardware (or, alternatively, with an emulator).

The link to that story about AllParadox is here for anyone who is smart enough to require them for a bold claim like that.

You can find other, independent corroboration of that from some poor sod who commented about it years ago, from someone who was briefly given moderation powers on Groklaw, and more recent examples on Jay Maynard's website which has some active discussions about how it's going down right now, with respect to those who don't think IBM was justified in how it intimidated TurboHercules SAS.

I've seen it personally, but you don't have to take my word for it. Their idea of "trolls" over there is anyone who disagrees too often. I think that anyone has been around Groklaw for long enough should remember how respected AllParadox was. She calls people who bring up this stuff "PJ moderates trolls" just so you know. Because nobody can think that sneaky moderation systems that don't show you when your post has been deleted, or silently editing people's comments are bad without being paid to think that by SCO, Microsoft or Satan.