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LinuxWorld Editorial Machinations
James Turner writes "The editors of LinuxWorld Magazine have been fighting a quiet war with the publishers (Sys-Con Media) for half a year, trying to get hack-journalist Maureen O'Gara purged from their site. Well, with O'Gara's recent vile attack on Pamela Jones (which I won't give any more free publicity by linking to), enough is finally enough.
In my latest blog, I've basically told Sys-Con that it's either her or me. I suspect, given the amount of page views O'Gara's tripe brings to the Sys-Con sites, that they'll choose her." James isn't the only one either.
Well, the fact that he says that the LinuxWorld staff have been calling for O'Gara to go for a while suggests that they already know his objections and, I assume, he has told them this in person by now.
I think he's just trying to protect his professional reputation by stating, openly and publically, that he is challenging LinuxWorld on this issue. That's quite brave, but if they do "call his bluff" and let him go, his reputation will be intact... he stated an ultimatum in public, they refused. Much better than giving the ultimatum in private, being pushed out and then loads of rubbish being wrote about why he'd left.
A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive harridan who supposedly writes the Groklaw blog about the SCO v IBM suit.
The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka "PJ," doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met her - in the pressroom at LinuxWorld in Boston complete with a Pamela Jones badge - and described her as a fortyish reddish-blonde who giggled a lot.
304 North Central Avenue, Hardsdale, NY[Photo: May 7, 2005 12:37 PM - 304 North Central Avenue, Hartsdale, New York. The last known address of Pamela Jones, as the superintendent of the building calls it, Ms. Pam Jones.]
Oh yeah? Wonder what cold crème she uses.
Pamela Jones is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel garden apartment in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 304 North Central Avenue in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is in Westchester and Westchester is IBM territory.
See, even though Groklaw treats cell phones like they were Kleenex and changes its unpublished numbers regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this flat and - wouldn't you know it but - some calls from there had been placed to the courts in Utah and to the Canopy Group so obviously this just isn't any Pamela Jones.
Pamela has lived in apartment 1A for 10 years at least, according to the super, who says he's watched people move in, have children, and the children marry and move away.
Now, this isn't your usual anonymous New York apartment. It's practically a self-contained village where the super goes for the old ladies' groceries when there's snow on the ground and people know each other's business.
[Photo: May 7, 2005 12:41 PM - 304 North Central Avenue, Hartsdale, New York. The last known address of Pamela Jones.]
But the super didn't know much about Pamela except that she had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, was "paranoid" - his word - and "sensitive to smells."
He remembered how he was cleaning paintbrushes one day and she came running down the stairs screaming "Fire."
She was also missing and had been for weeks.
Nobody there knew where she was.
She had up and disappeared one day, and the super was worried about her. He said her son had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some strange man that "nobody knew," as the super described him, had tried to get into her apartment while she was gone - the Medeco lock she had had installed on her door - something nobody else in the complex seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the door. But, as it happened, the super said, she had just sent in her rent in an envelope postmarked Connecticut.
Like an episode out of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego," the trail led to 10 Bittersweet Trail in Norwalk, Connecticut, 24 miles away. Sure enough, parked in the driveway was Pamela's car, just as the super had described it, a dark gray '90s Japanese number with a bunch of Jehovah Witness pamphlets tossed on the backseat.
The woman at the house, Barbara Jones Sharnik, told a disjointed story. She didn't know Pamela, Pamela hated her, Pamela wasn't there, Pamela left her car there because it got bumped, Pamela left her car there because she left town, and so on.
Afterwards Barbara called the cops, and then the cops called the number we left with her and the cops said that she was Pamela's mother and that Pamela was on the run and had shacked up with her mother because she had gotten "threatening mail" weeks before and that she had just gotten spooked again because "people were getting hurt around [my] stories" and had lighted out for Canada.
[Photo: May 7, 2005 2:24 PM - 10 Bittersweet Trail in Norwalk, Connecticut. Mom's house, where PJ's car was last seen on this driveway.]
Odd, the subject of my stories - or any
I am amazed that Sys-Con would continue to allow Maureen O'Gara to write. They must be desperate for the controversy that her articles cause, because I really see no value in them after reading a couple of them this morning. The worst article , and the one in question, tries to paint quite the negative picture of Pamela Jones' sanity and lifestyle. Instead it leaves me questioning O'Gara's ethics and sanity. Quite the smear campaign on the part of O'Gara.
So, Pamela Jones could perhaps be a 61-year old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a not so nice apartment. What does that have to do with anything? O'Gara finishes the article hinting that perhaps it is all stolen identity, though she didn't present a news story that would lead you to that conclusion.
I spent the first 23 years of my life as a Jehovah's Witness. I do not believe I am scarred in anyway because of it. If anything, I think I have a lot more respect for my fellow human beings and in general have a deep desire to be a good person. Sure the methodology of learning about the religion is a bit like brainwashing, but they have their religious beliefs like most religions. They just are more strict about the belief and the punishment if one does constantly violates them. If you are going to have faith, I think most religious people would appreciate the JW's strictness.
Did the religion make me paranoid? No. Does it take a lot of your time? Yes, but if you are going to devote your life to being religious then it probably should take a lot of time. Personally I appreciated science too much to put so much faith in religion. I still believe that if any religion has it right though, it is probably the JW's. They read the bible and do what it says. They refuse to pick up arms against another human, they punish sinners through disfellowshipping (total cut off until they have repented of their sins), and they make worship the primary thing in their life not allowing anything else to come first. There are obviously more devoted JW's than others, but that is true of any religion.
So, after reading the crap that passes for journalism from O'Gara, I personally can't wait to see her unemployed. Perhaps she can go get a job at the National Inquirer.
Don'y give them any unneccessary page hits.
Use the Google cache of the article instead.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Some people here appear to be assuming that there is some truth in the O'Gara article. It seems much more likely that everything in it originated in her imagination.
It's barely possible that she investigated a Pamela Jones: the wrong one.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
RTFA. The editors are aparently trying to get rid of O'Gara. The problem is that their management seems to make the final decision, which is too bad.
You can help by sending emails to the publisher asking for her removal and drop your subscription and don't visit the site if they don't. Remember, if the publisher is keeping her around because she is driving dollars, you and the linux community can fire back by walking away with those dollars.
from http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&si d=20050507193419581&title=&type=article&pid=311460 #c311509
PJ's take lets move on:
Authored by: PJ on Sunday, May 08 2005 @ 10:45 AM EDT
I agree. The person who originally suggested you all
go and look used a Long Island, NY, IP address, and
guess where you-know-who lives?
If we make the above assumption, we may deduce that
this was done for one of the following reasons:
1. to get you guys mad so you would act like "extremists" so
MOG and the mob can attack you again;
2. to get me mad so I sue her for slander, thus revealing
where I really live;
3. to set me up for the next "suicide" -- over my
"distress"
over "losing" my privacy. I have had some, including one
ex SCO employee, suggest this latter scenario as being
plausible. It seems not everyone in Utah thinks the
"suicides" were suicides.
Just in case 3 is true, let me state for the record that I
couldn't care less what MOG thinks of me, even if what
she wrote were true. I also don't care what anyone else
thinks. I'm proud of who I am and the choices I've made
in my life. I don't even care if Groklaw came to an end
tomorrow. I have no ambition, never have, didn't do
Groklaw to become famous or rich, so I truly don't
care. I would never commit suicide over anything, because
I think it's wrong, and I surely wouldn't over anything MOG
wrote, for I hold her in the deepest disdain, when I'm not
laughing at her.
From a dictionary:
Those silly "common people"...
Linuxtoday editor thinks so
6 OPBZ
Editor's Note: Screed Attempts to Silence Voice Against SCO
http://linuxtoday.com/infrastructure/200505090092
If people really want to see O'Gara gone, they should contact the companies that advertise in Sys Con Media publications, and let them know that you will not read any Sys Con Media publications while O'Gara is writing for them. If you contact Sys Con Media directly, they'll be overjoyed at the amount of free publicity that's being generated. If enough people contact the advertisers and let them know that the situation is unacceptable, they'll pull their ads. It's pretty hard to run a magazine with no advertising revenue.
There are many journalists and media sources who do not give in to the profit first mentality, i.e. democracynow.org, freespeech.org, pbs.org. Granted some of the messages from these outlets can be just as hair brained and off base as the paid shills, but they are out there none the less.
I will agree that for profit journalists and media bring in more cash for themselves and have the resources to make more noise and be in more peoples faces. However, the attention they get is not due to demand for their product no more than rubber neckers at a train wreck create a demand for more train wrecks.
And in case you haven't noticed, those same for profit journalists, media, and their corporate backers with deep pockets are funding a massive attack on the linux community because the community threatens their for profit revenue streams. The level of education and susceptibility of the community have little to do with the unethical actions of those who would attack the community.
burnin
(doh, forgot to post anonymously, maybe next time)
I am upset. If you write quite a bit, you learn a rule: you must never, ever write when you are upset. In such a state, clarity simply goes and what you thought was a masterpiece in truth was in fact... a pile of incomprehensible, misspelled crap.
I am going to do it anyway. I shall add a disclaimer: I am going to publish this article "as is" - no spell check, no Dave guard which turns my atrocious English into... well, English.
I am deeply upset and saddened by O'Gara's article on Pamela Jones at GrokLaw. To the point that I am absolutely speechless. I mean it. I don't know what to say.
I don't share O'Gara's ways nor approach. She seem to hate Groklaw, and the secrecy around this web site. Hatred is not a nice nor constructive feeling; it doesn't help anybody, and in fact it often goes against you (as it's going against Maureen right now); unfortunately, we all experience it and we all act out our anger sometimes.
This "pill" is here for two reason. The first one, is to ask you to... to forgive Maureen O'Gara. What she did was vile; but it was out of frustration and anger. She is a human being; she has made a great mistake; and she will pay for it. I ask you to forgive her because she is unforgivable, and it is right now that we all have to take out the best of ourselves and feel that even the unforgivable is... well, forgivable.
The second, more important reason why I am writing this (dangerously) unedited "pill", is to ask the question: why is Maureen's article unforgivable? I asked this to myself. In a way, you can even see where she is coming from: there is this wonderful site which is helping the demolition of SCO's absurd case, and it seems unlikely that a single individual could possibly run it all on her own. It is also true that if Groklaw were run by a bunch of IBM's lawyers, well, it would loose at least some of its credibility. I think I have reasons to believe that this is exactly what Maureen wanted to find out. Again, then: why is Maureen's article unforgivable?
Because there is a chance (and for a lot of us that's a fat chance) that Groklaw is run by a wonderful 40 or 60 year old woman or man who is a Christian or a Jehovah's Witness or a Buddhist, who believes in what she does to the point that she is willing to put herself in a dangerous position by doing so. Yes, I said dangerous, and I mean dangerous. There is a (big) chance that Pamela is in fact a woman who lives her everyday life, has a job, does what she has to do, and runs Groklaw thanks to the support of the whole Free Software and Open Source Community.
This paragraph is for you, Maureen: if that were the case, Maureen, you hurt somebody beyond belief. You hurt somebody so much, that I can only hope you will never, ever find out quite how mad the damage was. Because if you did find out, you would never be able to forgive yourself.
Well, that's a big weight out of my chest. But I am not quite finished yet. I want to talk about myself for a minute.
I am an ex-cracker born in Italy and living in Australia. When I was 18 and 19, I cracked quite a few computers and nearly went to jail for it. My phones were tapped, and only an amazing series of coincidences saved me. I didn't go through a trial, but a lot of people around me did. I never destroyed a system, but I did read files I should have read. If one day I made somebody very powerful really angry, I can see how they would be able to dig in my past and find all sorts of things that I would find "embarrassing" at least, compromising at worst. They could pick on my past as a cracker, on my religion (I am a Buddhist), on the way I live my life (I don't shop and yet I am not stingy), or on another million things.
Maureen, this is another paragraph for you. I am sure you haven't been a cracker, but if I were to look very, very thoroughly into your l
I am Quatermass who fairly regularly posts comments on Groklaw. I do not usually post on Slashdot, but I have a few words to say about Ms. O'Gara's article.
I do not know whether the "facts" alleged in Ms. O'Gara's article are correct or not, and whether or not she (or whoever supplied her the information) is describing the correct PJ or not.
For the sake of argument, in this post, I will assume that Ms. O'Gara is describing the correct PJ (if she did not, that makes her O'Gara's article even worse in my view).
If you boil down Ms. O'Gara's article to the essentials the "facts" alleged about PJ are this:
1. Ms. O'Gara doesn't like PJ's residence
2. Ms. O'Gara doesn't like PJ's car
3. Ms. O'Gara doesn't like the locks on PJ's apartment (Ms O'Gara then criticises PJ for these locks, but then goes on to also criticise PJ for having strange men apparently trying to break into her apartment - rather an odd and self-contradictory position don't you think?)
4. Ms. O'Gara alleges that PJ has been involved in business with her son.
5. Ms. O'Gara alleges that PJ has a fear of being stalked, and criticizes her for this (at the same time PJ tells us that PJ is being pursued if not stalked by Ms. O'Gara herself, as well as two strange men apparently trying to break into PJ's apartment - again, another odd and self-contradictory position, don't you think?)
6. Ms. O'Gara says PJ is older than Ms. O'Gara thought. (Well more fool you O'Gara, PJ never claimed to be any particular age, so who cares what O'Gara thought PJ's age was?)
7. Ms. O'Gara implies criticism of PJ's religious affiliation. (so what? Who cares what PJ's religion is)
8. Ms. O'Gara notes that PJ lives within a few miles of IBM's headquarters (without mentioning so do about a million or more other people too)
9. Ms O'Gara alleges that PJ has a brother with an expensive apartment.
10. Ms O'Gara says she questioned PJ's mother and didn't get clear answers. (So what?). I'd also point out that if PJ is 61, then PJ's mother must be in her 80s or 90s
Well, none of the above, have anything at all to do with the validity or otherwise of PJ's writing. PJ's writing stands for itself, and everybody should judge it on that basis.
The majority of the above, when striped of implied criticism are not particularly unusual - and not one is divergent with any fact that PJ has told us about herself.
The attack on PJ's age, car, religion, housing and brother, are purely gratutious personal attacks. All play to the lowest common denominator and people's prejudice. I really do not care what O'Gara thinks of PJ's car or house.
The self-contradictions in O'Gara's article abound, some of which are noted above.
I note that somebody else on Slashdot has alleged that O'Gara's information comes from SCO's private detectives seeking PJ. I do not know if this allegation is true or not.
I would note however the following:
1. In January 2003, O'Gara published an article about SCO's plans to monetize their IP allegedly in Linux. This was two months before SCO sued IBM. This was six months before SCO announced their Linux IP licensing program. This was long before SCO had made any public statements about their plans for licensing Linux, or alleged infringements in Linux. So where did O'Gara get this information from?
2. On September 18th O'Gara published an article claiming that SCO would sue IBM for a fraud claim, in Monterey, by putting SVR4 code (as opposed to SVR3 code) into AIX5L. [Maureen O'Gara misnames the UNIX versions in her article).
At the time that this was written, the only court document that mentioned fraud, and the AIX 5L was *sealed*, SCO's supplemental memorandum on discovery. This was filed with the court, without permission apparently in August, and properly filed on 13 September 2004.
We have not seen this document, but we know that it exists, because IBM's reply memo has recently been unseale