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SCO Vs. Groklaw
Conrad Mazian points us to an article in Forbes reporting that the SCO Group is trying to subpoena Pamela Jones of Groklaw. Except they can't find her. A few days ago PJ posted a note on Groklaw saying that she is taking some time away from the blog for health reasons; she didn't mention any SCO deposition. SCO's lawyers apparently believe that "Pamela Jones" does not exist and that Groklaw is penned by a team of IBM lawyers.
Remember that fictional movie critic Sony created awhile back? Maybe Pamela eloped with him? :-)
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
As far as I know, everything hosted on Groklaw has been a matter of public record, and the blog has been clear in its anti-SCO bias from the get-go. There's no gag order in place, is there? And there's no rule that says you need to be honest on the Internet. I mean, since the info is true, does it legally have any bearing if PJ is one of IBM's lawyers, a real person, or the Easter Bunny?
Also, if Groklaw was run by IBM lawyers, why would it get involved in the Sony rootkit fiasco? I mean, IBM wouldn't want to come out against Sony if they could avoid it (supplying the PS3 with parts as they are) and also, why have your lawyers handle stuff like that?
That there are no real females on the internet. I think SCO may have something here.
Seems quite clear to me she's not associated with IBM... I guess SCO doesn't know about Wikipedia.
I, however, am a figment of my own imagination.
All is paradox. Retired lawyer, so this is just one more layman's opinion.
...was convincing SCO she didn't exist.
Seriously waiting for Darl McBride to drop his coffee mug and see the name of IBM's lead attorney printed on the bottom.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
IBM wrote that wiki page. And the book in question does not exist. Don't bother posting an amazon link. They're in on it too.
Slashdot is as stupid for allowing his tripe to be posted here as Forbes is in employing him
A lot of people are asking why SCO would want to do this or would care. My theory is that SCO hopes to get access to IBM's attorneys' work product.
Normally an attorney's work product (memos, notes, theories, etc created as part of the attorney's work for a client) cannot be discovered by the opposing side. It works like attorney-client privilege.
However, just like the attorney-client privilege, the work product privilege can be waived intentionally or unintentionally if the attorney (or client) shares the information with someone outside the attorney-client relationship. SCO's theory may well be that if an IBM lawyer posts to Groklaw an analysis of the case that amounts to a summary of IBM's theory on the case, then SCO should be allowed access to all of the attorney's related work product. Depending on the judge, SCO may even be granted access to all of the work product of every attorney at that firm assigned to the SCO v. IBM case, although that's pretty unlikely unless the judge has some pet peeve about attorneys commenting to the media/public about ongoing cases.
So, while this may seem like just another last-ditch delay tactic by SCO (and it probably is), there may well be a not-entirely-unreasonable legal basis for it.
(Note: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.)
Not only is PJ a real person, but she is one of the few public intellectuals who really inspire with her integrity, honesty, and quirkiness. I swear I almost shed a tear when she resigned from a paying job to quickly dispel the FUD-of-the-week about her. It is amazingly rare to read such a person in todays world on issues of technology, business, and the law.
Quirk: She ardently enforces a policy of no cursing (she gives warning to users who write "BS"). She claims this is to keep discussion respectful.
She stands tall for what she believes is right, whether it relates to the SCO case or not. She has focused on many other issues, including great coverage of the current MS anti-trust case, and the MS/Novel deal, a well as long and recurring essays on ethics.
She graciously defers to people who know more than her on technical issues, and is willing to change her mind.
The underlying themes of her blog (often discussed explicitly) are:
* The US legal system is an attempt to be fair under difficult and complex situations -- it's hard to see this sometimes, but cynicism is an incorrect analysis.
* Business can be good, but business does NOT mean a sacrifice of all values except a quick buck. She is very pro-business.
* A person who stands firm in their knowledge of truth, even as others attack them, has a very difficult road ahead of them; but those who lie, attack, or surrender face harsh spiritual repercussions. In this, as in almost all of her attitude, a Christian sensibility shines through. But rather than being off-putting, dogmatic, or familiar, she comes across as convincing, passionate, and wise.
Thank you PJ! You are a role model for us all!
I've participated on Groklaw since the beginning, and would suggest that SCO is very troubled if this is all its legal team is left to manifest on.
It's comparable to Captain Queeg's determined investigation of the theft of ice cream in the classic Bogart film, The Caine Mutiny. Lacking anything else of substance to confirm his paranoid belief of mass insubordination, Captain Queeg becomes consumed with the delusion that a conspiracy is involved in the disappearance of ice cream on his ship. Unfortunately, this paranoia and further indecision under crisis results in his being relieved of duty.
SCO's relief of duty isn't far away, from reviewing their financials (absent third party financing at this point, 2007 should be their last as an operating concern). Pursuing delusions of a grand IBM conspiracy through the proxy of Pamela is unfortunate. I can certainly understand the absolute frustration some of Salt Lake City's finest socialites must feel in being beaten by unworthy middle class losers, open source geeks and an old money company like IBM. They were confident that political connections, "contributions" to candidates like dear Senator Hatch, ownership of the state judicial system and other entitlements the Salt Lake City elite expect on their home turf would extend to this litigation. Those born with the proverbial silver spoon affixed to their rear egress-orifice simply can't conceive that those from lessor social classes could ever best them.
Having closed at $1.01 today, SCO investors (even those who have shorted the stock) need to remember that when this security stresses, liquidity will be impossible to come by. Expect some real fireworks soon when shareholders discover liquidity necessary to exit is gone and a "bank run" occurs. Those considering shareholder action need to move before the management team constructs their parachutes in the next month or so, leaving nothing for creditors and litigants.
Time's running out...
I don't think it will help SCO at all. I think it's just a dirty trick they're using to punish PJ for speaking out against what they've been doing. But we all knew that, huh?
:(
I hope that when she feels better again, she finds some good way to respond to this deposition without giving SCO any opening to make all of her personal details public (like Maureen O'Gara once attempted to) and without opening herself up to any other form of harassment.
And I don't blame her one bit for being sick. Just thinking about the crap they're pulling now is enough to make me sick. She has every right to feel like a psycho ex is stalking her
So... even though the registration information is private, we do know a little bit. It seems that the DNS, website, and email are hosted by UNC.
:)
$ dig +short -t NS groklaw.net
ns2.unc.edu.
ns.unc.edu.
$ dig +short -t MX groklaw.net
0 mail.ibiblio.org.
$ dig +short groklaw.net
152.46.7.81
$ dig +short vhost.ibiblio.org
152.46.7.81
<ConspiracyTheory>
The directory of ibiblio.org is Paul Jones. Perhaps that's the real PJ
</ConspiracyTheory>
I have had direct communication with Pamela regarding PACER - specifically watermarking of documents obtained on PACER.
Her anger with me over my desire to label my documents with my website's URL is not the type of thing that a group of corporate attorneys at IBM would care about.
-- Mark Lyon http://www.marklyon.org
Whoever modded this down is an idiot. The fact is, Daniel Lyons at Forbes has a long history of attacking Groklaw and Pamela Jones. I believe he even once published the address from a 'whois' lookup on groklaw.net, believing that it was Pamela's address. Luckily she'd used a P.O box (or something) in a different state to register the domain. But that gives you indication of the ad hominim attacks that SCO and its supporters indulge in.
Just do a Google search. Sadly, many of these articles have been linked from here on Slashdot, giving Forbes and Daniel the page hits they desire.
IANAL, but I can vouch for the fact that she definitely exists.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
About 6 months ago there was this publicist "Maureen O'Gara" who actually went so far as to try and physically stalk Jones, and who saw fit to importune her mother. O'Gara seemed to have become obsessed with Pamela Jones who invariably pointed out holes, inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and plain lack of understanding in O'Gara's articles, and wanted to turn a factual businesslike dispute into something personal by putting Jones's address online. Regretfully, in the good old US of A this means that you will henceforth have to live with the increased probability that some random nutjob will take a shot at you or will otherwise assault you.
Having read Groklaw from the beginning, and having read a sizeable portion of the background materials, I'm firmly convinced that SCO's so-called "case" was only ever a transparant, meritless, and rather dirty attempt to extort money from Linux and Linux users, fortunately based on nothing but sloppy research, slipshod reasoning, and a shameless abuse of the US legal system to boot by trying to cash in on the threat of nuisance lawsuits.
And this "first" is brought to you by Forbes magazine, which is sort of interesting. Why? If you ever were on the lookout for biased, distorted, and inaccurate reporting favouring SCO and bashing all things GPL and Linux ... look no further than Forbes Magazine. Recently they stopped supporting SCO publicly, perhaps because it became obvious that SCO has no evidence of any kind for its grandiose claims. Forbes is also the rag that proudly trumpeted in 2003 that "Linux crunchies" should take SCO's allegations seriously because SCO was such a mean opponent in court and in business: "what SCO wants SCO gets". Forbes is also the magazine that touted dirty business tactics as "capitalism", and was always ready to defend any SCO tactic, no matter how underhanded.
Clearly, as others already remarked, the identity of Pamela Jones has no bearing whatsoever on SCO's case. Jones isn't a party in the case, and neither her testimony nor her identity can make any difference one way or another. Except perhaps with one single exception. A Jury trial. You know ... the place where the accumulated evidence of years is put through the mind of 10 lay persons in a few daily sessions, who then have to decide on guilt or innocence. That jury cannot access background materials on its own accord, but has to take all of its information from opposing lawyers. They may take notes, but that's it. Not put on a good enough emotional show, and you just might get that jury to overlook some home truths ... if they are buried deep enough.
SCO has had two-thirds of their case thrown out already by the magistrate judge for failing to produce competent evidence for their claims, but a lot of the more vague claims (as in "Linux infringes on our IP because it used Methods and Concepts that belong to us. No your honour ... we can't show you the files and line-numbers files where this happens in Linux because we're talking about methods and concepts, not actual code. It's more diffuse.") are still alive.
*sighs* This sort of talk will get you absolutely nowhere with anyone who is computer-literate ... but there's the rub. SCO can ensure that no-one who even remotely knows what the case is about will be on that jury. Why? Because if they're knowledgeable they will have heard about SCO versus IBM, will have read media coverage, e.g. Groklaw, and will have laughed their head off. Can't be
Part of SCOX's strategy was to cause IBM so much bad PR, that it would be worth their while to settle. What Groklaw has done is to expose SCOX's case (or lack thereof), destroyed SCOX's PR offensive, and nullified much of SCOX's FUD. The result is that IBM isn't hurting anywhere near as much as SCOX had hoped. Simply by reporting the truth, PJ has made things very difficult for SCOX. If she is named as a witness, PJ would be very restricted in what public statements she could make, and Groklaw gets effectively shut down. This might be a new legal tactic in the age of blogging. Strategic Subpeona Against Public Participation == SSAPP
Another reason why SCOX's case depends on showing that she had inside info from IBM. If you agree that a person with some legal background, with research contributed by a loose group of volunteers over the internet, but no inside info from IBM, could put together documentation that so totally destroys SCOX's legal case...
then you have to agree that a university student with some computing background, with research contributed by a loose group of volunteers over the internet, but no inside info from IBM, could put together an OS that totally destroys SCOX's OS in the marketplace... oops.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
That was also my first reaction when I read that. It is obviously an attempt to marginalize the EFF by making it look like a stupid hippie organization from SF that defends kooks on the Internet. I always thought the defense of Free Speech was everybody's responsibility, and the Constitution is not exactly new technology.
This should come as no surprise as the reporter is Daniel Lyons (ugh... human resources... what a creep). PJ appears to have gotten after him in this Groklaw article (which points to this Forbes.com article). And has mentioned him in several other articles(no, I am not going to read and comment on all of them for this post -- do it yourself). He refers to PJ's criticism in today's posted article:
As an interesting side note, the reference Groklaw and Forbes articles mention this odd little tidbit:
Does anybody else find it interesting that there is a Redmond, Washington based company named, of all things Vista.com that invested in SCO at the beginning of the lawsuit? We all know that MS used Baystar as an investment front for the SCO litigation, but this makes it appear that MS had as many as three fronts set up to invest money in SCO right before the lawsuit (MS's purchase of a SCO license was the third).
Considering Windows Vista is MS's new "killer" product which incorporates hardware DRM to defend MS from Linux, could "Vista" mean a broad plan to attack FOSS in general?
I thought the devil had many names. Why is he using the same one more than once this time?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
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Well having followed Groklaw almost from outset, and having watched a very distasteful episode where SCO paid a journalist to track down Pamela, who then posted an article showing pictures of PJ car, house a mother I pretty certain from that alone PJ is a real person.
Added to that I've spoken to her on the phone and exchanged over the last few years perhaps a couple of dozen emails, she seems very real to me.
BTW, the article I mention above was withdrawn almost if not totally by all the websites that carried it and indeed some news editors resigned from their posts in protests at what they and many others saw as a gross violation of privacy.
All the details can be found on Groklaw itself, and Im sure creative use of the internet archive can bring back the disappeared articles no problem.
And finally, whilst I have no idea about the status of PJ health, I can say from the conversation I had with her a couple of months back I was left thinking she felt pressured and harassed (she didn't say that, it was just the impression I got), I can also confirm from conversations I've had with her she holds herself to a very high level of integrity in what she does and says.
That SCO are trying to find her again, after the last debacle just leaves me with an even bitterer taste in my mouth with SCO, something I didnt think was possible.
Given that "Pamela Jones" is an anagram of "Me Jalapenos", I can only assume that this is indeed an elaborate hoax.