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Maureen O'Gara No Longer Welcome at LinuxWorld
flood6 writes "On the heels of yesterday's article about unrest at LinuxWorld, editor James Turner is reporting in his blog that Sys-Con Media has decided to purge Maureen O'Gara from the print and online publications." From the post: "Sys-con Media listened to what I and my fellow editors, their advertisers and the readership was saying, and made the correct decision. Maureen O'Gara's bylined material will no longer appear anywhere in the Sys-con universe of sites or publications. We have received this commitment in writing from Fuat Kircaali, the publisher." PJ at Groklaw also has commentary on this development.
Didn't another SCO henchmen - Jeff Merkey - already tell us the personal details of PJ? This MOG person's account doesn't seem to fit the picture Merkey painted.
It's not surprising, really, since MO'G's last article on Pamela Jones so clearly overstepped the bounds of decent, public interest journalist.
Incidentally, was I the only person who felt that insinuating that PJ's religion was wacko was particularly ironic, given that Maureen's paymasters at SCO were based in Utah, home of the not-exactly-christian-orthodox Church of the Latter Day Saints.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Shouldn't the editors and slashdotters here who scream censorship at every turn be unhappy about this decision.
This is a clear cut case of censoring someone simply for their opinions. Instead of arguing O'Gara's writings, they are purging here instead.
This reminds of of how communist USSR and China would just "erase" those who would defer from the leadership.
I don't like O'Gara but I wouldn't want here censored either. The way to fight speech you don't like is to fight back with more speech, not to silence them.
The Army reading list
Was Maureen O'Gara REALLY pro-SCO or just being destructively sensationalistic?
Why did a magazine called LinuxWorld continue to print garbage by someone who is so obviously anti-Linux?
by sys-con imho. they have repeatedly shown themselves to be anti-linux and they are only doing this because of the pressure [and potential legal issues].
they are most certainly not acting because it was the right thing to do.
sum.zero
Ok, the summary didn't make it clear to those of us who don't RTFA. Who is she, why isn't she welcome and why do we care? Thanks.
Hearing that Maureen will no longer publish her nonsense articles is certainly good news. But nowhere does it say she actually got sacked by sys-con.
Without evidence of the contrary , I must however assume she is still "Editor in chief" of "Linux Business Week" and thus still getting paid by sys-con.
The only thing which was made clear is that she could not publish articles authored by herself anymore.
Cheers,
Andre
Amazing what a loss of advertisers can do.
But I still want to see her around. She and her kind have done more to help Linux than have hurt it. Everytime they FUD, they get called on it. MOG, Dido, Enderle, Dvorack, IDG, Gartner, etc. are losing their credibility.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
PJ has put a helluva lot of effort into blowing holes in SCO's FUD. In fact, I think that she deserves considerable credit for pretty much snuffing out SCO's publicity campaign. That SCO's supporters would stoop to this level is indicative of just how badly things have become. It's been months since there's been any big SCO news item. Nobody cares any more, though all the shareholders that are going to get kicked in the balls when this whole thing slides into oblivion taking their money with it will in the fullness of time. And I personally won't shed a single tear for them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I know editor is a dirty word here on slashdot, but with a supposed profesionally publication where the hell were the editors?
Don't most people expect writers to bring drafts and editors tweak before publishing? I mean did NO ONE on staff read this article before it went live? Did they just hand her a publish account and let her loose?
She sounds like scum, but there's some serious procedure problems as well that allowed this kind of work to happen.
This action brings up the question: does this put LinuxWorld in the same category as every other partisan hack? While O'Gara's latest column appears to have been over the line (the world will never be able to judge after this), is full removal of all her material necessary?
From this, I gather that claims of censorship only apply when it's someone you agree with.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
If I were P.J., I'd be filing charges on O'Gara right now. Her actions are likely sufficient to fall under 18 USC 875(c), the Interstate Stalking Punishment and Prevention Act of 1996. She traveled across state lines in an effort to violate the privacy of an individual who has quite reasonable fear for her safety. O'Gara may also be liable under New York's anti-stalking laws as well.
At the very least, I'd be filing for a restraining order by now.
Furthermore, Sys-Con was exceptionally negligent in ever allowing that sort of thing to be published. Not only is it a gross and blatant violation of journalistic ethics, but it's quite possibly opened them up to a devastating legal action.
It's beyond disgusting that something like that would ever be published - most bloggers wouldn't dream of pulling crap like that, but to have a supposedly "professional" organization allow potentially libelous and obviously private information to be disseminated is absolutely unconscionable.
Uh, IBM Vermont is in Burlington, which is our largest city and does not have 80% of its population employed ay IBM.
I'm in an IBM town and given their penchant for laying people off to minimize retirement expenditures, I can assure you that my opinion is not biased in their favor.
I'm inclined to think that you've never been to IBM Vermont. IBM Vermont employs a few thousand workers, total.
SO who's next, Enderle or Dildio?
Speaking as an avid reader of Groklaw, the problem is not PJ per se. The problem is that Groklaw has been quite instrumental in digging out the evidence that gives lie to SCO's various claims (I wouldn't be surprised to find out after the case is done that Groklaw's research was used by both sides in their preparations).
Whether Maureen O'Gara acted under direction from SCO and company, or whether she is just a biased journalist, remains to be seen. But the recent spate of articles against PJ is more of an attack against Groklaw's effectiveness (and by inference in my opinion, free and open dialog). The fact that O'Gara et al have stooped to personal attacks in itself says a lot about their desperation (again, IMHO).
It's really comical in one sense, yet dangerously close to blatant hate mongering (I can't think of any other way to say it, sorry). For a professional journalist to publish personal details like Maureen O'Gara did is inexcusable (I'm sure Maureen wouldn't want her personal details published on a web page -- imagine all of the anti-SCO kooks out there that might use it for nefarious purposes).
In any case, apparently the only thing that SCO can come up with to counter Groklaw is to try and paint it as an IBM lackey or worse, and so both Groklaw and PJ has been under attack recently. All I can say is, when it comes to trust and integrity, who would you pick: SCO or Groklaw?
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Who Is Pamela Jones?
By Maureen O'Gara
Friday May 6, 2005
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.
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.
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 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.
Odd, the subject of my stories - or any stories - never came up during our brief interview. I was just looking for Pamela.
That left Pamela's son, Nicolas Richards, who, as it happens, had been in the software business in Manhattan until - why, my goodness - things seem to have come a cropper right around the time Groklaw came into existence.
Nick and his ma were apparently involved together in Medabiliti Inc, an ISV, because one P
I think you are confusing anti-Linux criticism with "smear campaign against an individual". I could freaking care less about anti-whatever opinions... everyone has opinions and can pretty well spout them off at will. I'm sure this isn't the death knell for doubters, criticism and FUD. In fact, it would be a bad thing if it was: the Linux crowd if *fueled* by every off in left field wacko who overstates the "communist conspiracy" or other hyperbole. Gets the blood pumping. More reasoned criticism is also a good thing as it identifies weaknesses and allows them to be exposed, attacked and resolved.
This was neither. This was a personal attack run by an angry, bitter woman against another woman. Not seeing what there is to *support* in that behaviour.
Sig under construction since 1998.
It's a bit worse that that for O'Gara. Research posted on Groklaw has pointed out that it sure seems like O'Gara had access to previously sealed court documents (now unsealed in some cases), based on the timing of some of the articles she has published. If true, that could put her and her sources in serious (i.e. criminal) hot water...
Could the issue of illegal access to sealed documents as implied on Groklaw be a motive to her attempt to get all documents in the case unsealed, as well as the recent attacks on PJ? Should be interesting to see what comes of that...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Umm, IBM Vermont is not in Burlington. It is in Essex Jct and Williston, although Williston just mean they are on the other side of the river. Most of the engineering and testing is done on the Williston side with the main fab being on the Essex Jct side.
IBM also employs 8,000 people directly in it's Vermont plant and another 6,000 to 7,000 via contract for support services which range from custodial to water treatment, to construction crews, to grounds keepers.
This once small town has boomed into a upper middle class suburb that exists solely for the purpose of housing IBM employees. I lived there for a while and can say that IBM was revered for what it did for the economic development of the town via taxes. It was hated for the environmental damage it did. There is no aquatic life in the river for a 1 mile stretch after is passes through the IBM plant.
A few other odd pieces of trivia are that the original fab was in Williston. It was moved after a chemical spill. The EPS told IBM that if so much as a bottle of IPA was leaked into the contaminated ground they would be required to remove the earth under the buildings and dispose of it as toxic waste.
IBM decided to instead move the fab.
That particular plant is the foundry for most Nortel equipment as well. The layoffs that happened there about 5 years ago were because Nortel canceled over 60 million in contracts in a weekend.
So don't pretend to know about IBM Vermont. At least get your facts straight before you troll. IBM is more then a company for many it is a way of life. There was a time when having a job with IBM meant having a job for life. That time has passed but the attitude of IBM as a provider has not and influences peoples opinions in everyday life.
Excuse me, just how do YOU know how many people complained to the advertisers? I personally complained to Google (politely), and received a response that they were in fact investigating the matter. This would suggest that I wasn't alone... ...It also makes me a bigger fan of Google ;-)
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
In regards to other FOSS issues, PJ does a terrible terrible job, presenting mainly Opinion (her opinion) as topic, with chitterings of approval coming from her chorus.
yeah, but ....
if MOG had been a print journalist she would have been fired but all her previous articles would survive in libraries and microfiche etc.
It would not be practical (or leagel, ethical, whatever) to hunt down and remove everything she had ever written for that journal.
The situation with a web publisher is different because it is possible for them to remove the pages so that people can no longer read them. They _may_ still be online in The Wayback Machine or something similar, but for most people they are gone, they have ceased to exist.
This is not a good thing. It is revisionist, changing the historical record to show a particular angle rather than taking it as it comes.
I hope that MOG's previous articles are not withdrawn/removed/censored by sys-con. After all without bing able to see her articles how will people be able to see what a lousy 'journalist' she was?
The most recent article of course should be removed because of the personal information it purports to contain about a woman called Pamela Jones. As the The Inquirer points out there is no proof that the woman MOG's article attacks is actually the 'real' PJ.
Felix_the_Mac
However, there have been two (apparent) suicides in the wake of the whole SCO/Canopy goings-on, and PJ herself mentioned "predictions" of her own suicide by posters on the Yahoo (finance, SCOX[E] stock) message board. She took it seriously enough to point out on Groklaw that, should anything happen to her, it would most assuredly not be suicide.
This specific issue (MOG's nasty article and her subsequent removal from Sys-Con sites) could be fairly judged a "tempest in a teapot", I suppose, but zoom out a bit and I would have to say otherwise.
fD