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Groklaw Turns One
JuliusRV writes "Today is Groklaw's one-year anniversary! As PJ writes, 'What a difference a year makes. When we started, all the headlines were saying that SCO was going to destroy Linux or at least make it cry. Now, looking around today, I see almost everyone predicting SCO's imminent doom instead. I think the truth, as usual, isn't in the headlines, and that it's somewhere in between those two extremes.' Thanks, PJ and all other Groklawyers, keep up the good work!"
Now, looking around today, I see almost everyone predicting SCO's imminent doom instead.
You must remember that back in the days of the OJ trial many thought he would be convicted, but he wasn't. And people have said so often how Apple will die soon / tomorrow / whatever. So I would hesitate to predicate SCO's doom just yet... but a man can dream!
Oops.
I mean Happy Birthday Grocklaw.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I'm glad that I can still use Linux, as it's the best operating system for serving up obscene volumes of multimedia content over the web. If SCO had been able to make good on their threats (and I'm sure now that if it hadn't been for Groklaw, nobody would've ever heard about this), our operating costs would've gone through the roof and we would've ultimately had to shutdown. Cheers, Groklaw! And let us hope you have another 1 year of existence ahead of you!
Software piracy is victimless theft.
....as I know lawyers love to do, but PJ is a grokParaLegal I believe and not a grokLawyer. Regardless, great work and great site.
It must feel really nice to know you are largely responsible for the ongoing education of millions of readers.
The OJ case brought us extreme media saturation, and everybody was cognisant of the circumstances and facts around the case. This is different.. computer media shills trumpeted the virtues of SCO's case and the national magazines pickup up the shill's cries and gave them flight.
;)
Well, I am really glad that PJ's work has become pivotal in illuminating the real facts behind SCO's "case". It's an excellent central point of information against SCo's disinformation campaign. Excellent work PJ. Congrats on 1 year
-B
December 2003 : The SCO Group cannot expect to win any case based upon application interfaces which it's AT&T, USL and Novell predecessors relased in open standards specifically for the purpose of interoperability
March 2004 : How the lawsuit is going to go in court
She's a GNU/grokParaLegal
... I'd like some more karma)
(please mod me underrated, not funny
... we had GrokLaw for Watergate, Rodney King, Clinton, and OJ, the world would be a much better place. WAIT- no way to get /. "discussions" on Watergate as-it-was-happening. Pity.
I wish I could write clever and witty sigs.
I wonder what it would take to bring about the demise of SCO. I always assumed that SCO were a company who had turned to litigation because they couldn't sell products. Given that they've started to lay off staff around the world you'd think that their belts must need tightening. Does history have any examples of these things turn out?
Regardless of what you think of the business direction SCO has taken, it must be worrying for the staff who still have families to feed. ATle ast they'll still be able to afford GNU/Linux...
Cogito, ergo sig.
This is human nature. As much as we like "bad girls" or "bad boys", we always pick the good. In 90% of the stories, the hero (mostly good) wins.
Today is Groklaw's one-year anniversary!
No, it's Groklaw's first anniversary. The "year" is baked in.
Fark and ArsTechnica probably have articles too.
The /. editors are terrible.
</satire>
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
The remaining question for SCOX is "how low can it go"? Except for that bump in early April, when SCO tried, unsuccessfully, a stock buyback to prop up the price, the decline from 14 to 5 has been close to linear. If you just project the line out, SCOX goes to zero around late summer. It probably won't go to penny stock levels for a while, though; they have some cash left. But with no licensing revenue and a huge legal burn rate, they can't go on for all that long.
The real question at this point, and it's one the players in the Open Source industry need to think about, is, who ends up with the rights to UNIX when SCO is gone? Sun? IBM? Red Hat? Boies?
It's sad, in a way, to realize that the best thing the original UNIX can do is go away.
It seems like groklaw is not accessible from China - or perhaps it is just from my location.
Anyone else in China able to get to it?
Why would it be inaccessible, I wonder?
Some are already saying that SCO may be the tip of the iceberg as far as FOSS IP problems are concerned, even as SCO's case seems to be declining. (See the current issue of Fortune magazine, with Darl McBride on the cover, unfortunately not available online except to paid subscribers). Of course, one can argue that proprietary software should be held to same standards, but in practice FOSS is an easier target because the source code can be examined by hungry lawyers and they can always bring up the worldwide, quasi-anonymous nature of development of some projects.
According to anyway :)
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
I always assumed that SCO were a company who had turned to litigation because they couldn't sell products.
Well, that was only the tip of the iceberg.
The rest of it is that BayStar (and others?) delivered a truckload of cash to SCO with a prod in the ribs and a wink.
SCO is evil.
BayStar is more evil, because it funds companies to play the asshole/evil war against the big guns - encouraging companies to take up the rifles of Intellectual Property (and I don't just mean those companies being funded - I mean other companies seeing BayStar make a dollar and wanting to jump on the bandwagon).
This ENCOURAGES shitty patents. The broader the better: the more you can sue.
Linux must have looked like a fucking gold mine to BayStar.
I find the whole idea disturbing. I'm crossing my fingers that before SCO dies, BayStar breathes its last too.
That's a gross oversimplification. Trial by jury is prone to the influence of money in that better lawyers can be hired by one side or the other, but in the end it's even more prone to the social context in which the case takes place.
For example, jury trials in the American South before the enacting of federal Civil Rights legislation were absurdly biased in favor of whites and against blacks. This had nothing to do with money and everything to do with racism.
Big companies in the age of Rockafeller and Carnegie were left relatively unfettered until Americans began to resent the range and depth of the Robber Barons' influence. Then in trial after trial, the monopolies were hit hard by plaintiffs seeking damages from large companies. When Americans perceive a powerful entity as being generally useful, they tend not to press it too hard, but when they see it as having overstepped its bounds, juries tend to come down against Big Business.
Witness the recent spate of Wall Street trials. While there was certainly widespread malfeasance during the Dot-Com era, the Tyco execs, Martha Stewart, et. al. are in some ways being convicted not because of what they specifically did, but because the American public, as represented by jurors, is tired of this sort of rampant greed and wants to send a message to the executive class.
Lawrence Friedman's Law in America is a great primer (only 200 pages) on how the American legal system evolved, and how it has shaped and been shaped by American society.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I'm not too familiar with moderation on Groklaw, but I would not be surprised to find your assessment correct. Moderation without accountability or transparency is rampant on the net. Outright deletions of trolling posts is a great way to win the battle but lose the war. Slashdot deserves mad props for being able to combat the trolls without resorting to mass post deletion. Some don't understand why this is so important. I was in a discussion with the owner of fark, and he saw outright deletions as just as "bad" as slashdot's moderation. The difference is that I can see everything pushed to -1, and feel confident that moderation is being applied correctly. In other systems, I have no idea if moderation is being abused.
To bring this back to the topic at hand, PJ should realize that the best way to fight ignorance and stupidity is with information, not moderation. Quashing the views of your opponents in any discussion makes you no better. The reason Groklaw has been so successful is in drudging up info that SCO would rather have had remained forgotten. The ultimate lesson should not be that SCO is bad, but that information is good. More information almost always leads us from deceit and error to truth and understanding.
--
As a final aside, I was so fed up with the abusive moderation on fark and other sites I've seen that I created my own to stand as a counter example of the way to run a web forum. It will likely never be very popular, but hey, it's better than just randomly bitching about such moderation. You can read more about it here.
Mmmm...I agree that PJ has become less objective than she was a year ago, when I considered her to be *very* scrupulously objective. She has become "part of the community", and it's hard to remain utterly cold when you're in such a position. She's also put up more "what if" conspiracy type thoughts herself. They may be perfectly valid, but I do think Groklaw is less valuable for it -- it was once somewhere that you could just aim PHB types -- even if the comments could be a bit out there, PJ's articles were strictly down-to-earth analysis. Even if ESR's Halloween memos and theories are perfectly well-founded (and some of them are almost certainly pretty accurate), they're tough to sell to someone who isn't part of the Linux world and has kind of vaguely always trusted Microsoft.
I don't see the problem you do with the "FUD insurance" (though the conflict of interest is obvious) because PJ has done an admirable job of tamping down fear of legal violations. She is clearly in an abusable position; I have not seen anything that I would call abuse, though.
I agree that Groklaw could use a bit less of the anti-SCO humor and Darl-namecalling from posters -- that's really better placed on Slashdot, with it's stronger moderation system.
I also am interested as to whether PJ will begin to wind down Groklaw (as was my original impression) as SCO sputters down, or (as I'm starting to think) she will keep it alive as a forum to discuss Linux legal issues. It is clearly valuable to her employer, as she speaks with some authority on Linux legal issues.
May we never see th
Sure, the American justice system may have its flaws, but I doubt that the prosecution in the OJ case went to court saying "We're going to try to put this innocent man in jail so that we can look good and get a promotion". Well, maybe one or two of them were characterized a having had a similar attitude, but it's not like they didn't have a case, and it's not like they didn't have any evidence.
The problem SCO is going to have is that they underestimated "free software", because they didn't really know ENOUGH about "free software". The people bringing the suit aren't computer scientists, and the analysts claiming that SCO "might have something" aren't computer scientists either. The only chance that they have of winning is if the justice system fails; it's not Linux that's being questioned; it's the US justice system that's being questioned; it's the US justice system that's being sued.
Furthemore, I think many of us now realize that you can't really sue Linux, because "free software" is everyone, because "free software" is freedom of speech; it's not a company like Microsoft that you can sue. All over the world, people aren't going to stop using Linux, and if SCO is going to get anywhere, they are going to have to win many court cases, and they are going to have to show the same evidence in each case, evidence that, with almost complete certainty, it can be said, does not exist.
Now... to be fair, I imagine that it would be possible to turn SCO around; look at what Lee Iacocca did with Chrysler - it's possible, but with four patent lawsuits from IBM hanging over your head, a Red Hat lawsuit, and numerous GPL violations to boot, this is going to be difficult, so in their case, there is, let's say, a grave danger of "Live by the sword, die by the sword", happening. Unlike some people, I don't really wish any harm to SCO, because it's not SCO's fault - SCO is a business, and I would never wish financial disaster on any business. That's unethical. It's PEOPLE who work at that business that have encountered misinformation. Misinformation about Linux, misinformation about Unix, misinformation about "free software". It's basically, if I were to boil it down to a simple statement, it's that these lawsuits against Linux are being brought by individuals who aren't computer scientists.
I remember that there was a case in the US where a man sued "the devil". He claimed the devil had caused him to commit all these sins and hurt his loved ones and that he was taking the devil to court because he wanted to bring him to justice. The reason that the case was thrown out was because the court did not know where to send the devil's subpeona to. So similarly, with Linux, the question is how do you subpeona free speech? Where does free speech live? What is free speech's address? Many would say America. See? But basically, it's freedom of speech that is giving all of these proprietary software companies headaches. And suing freedom of speech is, in a strange but opposite way, like suing the devil.
If VA Software (once known as VA Linux) goes out of business, there will be severe repercussions in the open source world. (I think that this is unlikely, but they might be pared down.)
VA Software owns OSDN, the collection of Slashdot, Newsforge, Freshmeat, Geocrawler, and Sourceforge and some other major OSS sites (I consider the above five to be the most critical). In most cases, if VA Software goes under, it's probable that VA will have to do what it can to sell off assets and data (rather than freely releasing them) to either return to profitability or pay off creditors.
Let's look at a couple of these:
* Newsforge. Without doing research, I'm guessing that Newsforge is not self-sustaining, and would probably have difficulty being very profitable, thus it probably could not be spun off. I don't think Newsforge has significant assets in the form of IP. On the other hand, Newsforge is a fairly biased, propagandaish news source that doesn't attract a lot of mainstream attention. The loss of Newsforge probably wouldn't do too much damage to the OSS world.
* Slashdot. Slashdot can probably (perhaps given some tweaks) be self-sustaining. There are a lot of things that can be done (like ad banners and subsucriptions, as is now the case) that would probably let Slashdot keep itself afloat without drastically changing the way Slashdot works or damaging userbase size, and a number of somewhat more intrusive things that could be done that would allow Slashdot to still remain a major tech forum. Slashdot is somewhat replaceable (especially since Slashcode is open) but it would take a long time to produce such a valuable database and user base -- and given the value of these, Slashdot could probably be sold to a number of organizations. Slashdot's comment database is enormously valuable, and may rival USENET for data on a number of tech issues. Its loss would be damaging.
Slashdot is frequently biased and sometimes inaccurate, but it has a significant degree of clout. Mainstream news sources definitely go over Slashdot to identify interesting tech topics. Slashdot is an important place to get people upset about or make them aware of things relevant to the open source world -- it is probably currently the single most important such forum. It helps produce rapid community response to issues -- there have been a number of times that (major) changes have been made (vendors making statements on Linux support, people finding alternative hosting to keep important resources alive, etc) after Slashdot highlights points. It is a significant political mobilizer, and assists other mobilizers -- it is unlikely that nearly so many people would frequent Groklaw without the attention Slashdot gave it. In general, Slashdot significantly improves communication, open source visibility, reduces response time, and facilitates the spread of memes in the open source community. I would consider it to be extremely important, and the loss of it a major setback.
* Freshmeat. Freshmeat is a major resource for *IX software. There is no other database that is nearly as comprehensive or helps get the word out about important updates. Google can replace some of Freshmeat's features (the ability to locate a project homepage is somewhat less useful that it used to be). However, while Freshmeat does not provide updated competitive reviews of software projects, it is *the* single place to go when one wants to find a list of potential *IX applications to solve a problem. This has significant trickedown effect to even end users -- if one works at Red Hat and is trying to find a good CLI FTP client to bundle with Red Hat, Freshmeat is where to start looking for one. Freshmeat can probably maintain itself, especially as it may have lower resource usage than Slashdot. Freshmeat is probably the primary location to spread warnings about an intentionally malicious application (such as one that adds backdoors to a system) since many people will see Freshmeat comments when doing initial-evaluation of soft
May we never see th