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Groklaw Shifts Gears, Now Stressing Preservation
dan of the north notes a change of direction at Groklaw. Pamela Jones (PJ) writes: "I think we need to use this time to perfect our work and ensure Groklaw's preservation. It will require shutting down the daily articles and News Picks, at least for the forseeable future, but I'm convinced it's important to do it. One of the core purposes of Groklaw has always been to create a reliable record for historians and law schools to use our materials to teach and inform. ... I choose to make sure our work as fully reliable, comprehensive and, to the degree humanly possible, permanent. ... Groklaw's collection of materials is really valuable. I'd like to ensure that it survives. ... We've covered the SCO litigations since May of 2003, and it's the only complete record of this important phase in IT history."
It ain't over yet!
If Groklaw has the only complete record of the SCO ligitation then some court archivist should be looking for work.
Will be there something to cover after the SCO trial is over?
While the corpse is still twitching, we are waiting for the formal burning, so its good that Groklaw keep up with the formalities.
And while it has been good to follow along, I agree it will be more for academia than for the casual web user.
Good Luck to PJ.
Those were halcyon days, back when Groklaw was in eveyr technorati's bookmarks, and all nerd-rage found a unifying enemy in SCO. 6 years later, Linux is free and clear, the Alex de Tocqueville institute is forgotten, as is Dan Lyons, Daniel Wallace, Maureen O'Gara, the Yankee Group, and the guy who did tech news and SCO-shilling who is so forgotten I can't even find him on Google anymore (a testament to how old this stuff is: I read about him every day and I can't even remember or find his name).
Back then, it was the few and informed fighting against the ignorance of an entire market of empty-headed, buzzword-filled suits. It stoked my ego to have a "cause" to fight for, even if it was exclusively by arguing with trolls on the internet.
But the job's done. I'm not aware of any rampant corporate FOSS-phobia (every big player's got their hands in the pot, now). SCO's dead. Linux lives. And it survives merely on its merits, not because of any inherent philosophical superiority. Technorati and business pro's alike (it's a Venn diagram; I know) choose the best tool for the job. The old arguments are, for the most part, dead.
I think the end of Groklaw as a significant force in FOSS started around the time of the "GrokWars." It's obvious to me that if allies have enough time to fight each other (over stupid stuff, at that), then whatever common enemy it was that held them together is either dead or irrelevant.
While Groklaw had some significant voice in the GPL v3 debate, I think that was its last hurrah. Today, we simply don't need Groklaw anymore.
Of course, I would call that success of mission.
Surely your amazing prowess is unsurpassed in the known universe.
Women want you, men bow their heads, and all of creation wants to be just like you.
Truly, the Übermensch has arrived !!
you backup and archive the site on a daily (hourly) basis and continue to post articles. Why shutdown the whole thing? This makes no sense. Maybe they're taking some cues from \.-sister site, Linux.com.
I've got your sig, right here.
PJ said in the first interview (31 July 2003):
"I was forever reading Slashdot comments about legal news and most of the comments would be way off..."
I'm shocked!
Doesn't this lend credit to the idea that perhaps PJ was hired solely to cover the SCO trial?
Was her mysterious identity ever uncovered?
I read PJ's post on Groklaw, linked to in the article summary. It seems as if she's effectively defining Groklaw's purpose as being to deal with the threat to free and open-source software brought on by the SCO cases; that being so, if the threat from SCO is over, there's not much to do except to make sure that the tons of archived information is correct, and to work to make it easily accessible to those who might come to need it in the future.
1. Is it really the case that the SCO cases are over? It's true that SCO's cases against IBM, Autozone, and Red Hat are moot if SCO doesn't hold the copyrights they use as the basis for their claim; but SCO plans to appeal the judgment in Novell's favor. Until that appeal is done, it doesn't seem to me to be over.
2. Even assuming the SCO aspect of this situation is over, the fundamental issues here haven't been decided. Essentially, the judgment against SCO means that SCO doesn't have standing to bring a lawsuit against IBM. But if Novell were to become evil, then who's to say they couldn't bring such a lawsuit? The fundamental question of whether Linux infringes on UNIX copyrights has yet to be decided on in court (however ridiculous any of us may feel such a claim to be). That was the issue when Groklaw originally got started, and it's still out there.
3. Furthermore, it's not the only legal issue that could threaten Linux or other FOSS projects in the future. Groklaw has at times addressed issues associated with patents and trade secrets, and those aren't going anywhere. And we still have yet to finish cases in which software companies attempt to invalidate the terms of the GPL, to exculpate themselves from appropriating code from projects licensed under the GPL -- also a topic occasionally covered by Groklaw. I understand that it's PJ's blog, and her life, and the focus of Groklaw is whatever she says it is. But it's still sad, because the decision to define the focus of the resource (for that's what its archives and especially its participant base are) narrowly leaves behind a vacuum at a time when there are still real threats to oppose.
I understand the need to draw down, but I certainly would hate for PJ to totally throw in the towel. She's accomplished something by harnessing the output of the legal system to an FOSS platform in a way Geeks can understand. That is elegant and original and incredibly, incredibly important. What about net neutrality and invasion of privacy and the next organization that decides, "Who cares about legality, we can get away with it." Groklaw is the 11th commandment. Thou shalt not get away with it. The legal system as it is, is the OS of our society. Groklaw is the repository for documentation of that OS and the ways it can be played with or corrupted, the same way exploits can be carried out in computer operating systems. It's stretching a metaphor naturally.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
Or now that SCOX is dead, the secret funding behind Groklaw has dried up, leaving them hanging on the vine? /btw, I hate SCOX too, I'm just sayin'
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
That's pretty damned scary.
I have finally understood it! Society is running Windows! That's why the legal system is slow, overly complex, buggy, expensive, designed by marketing I mean campaign contributions, applies itself to things that are not legal problems, and not under the control of the average end users! Suddenly it makes sense.
Yeah, that's still pretty scary.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
There's groups like the EFF, sites like Chilling Effects, and individual blogs like NYCL's, news aggregators like Slashdot, magazines like Wired, and many others... I can only begin a list of the categories, let alone the sites themselves.
Groklaw has been a rallying point for part of the online civil discourse, but it's not the only one. Perhaps the community that has grown around Groklaw can keep using it as a touchstone, as they shift their own emphasis to other parts of the web, but that doesn't need Pamela's continued engagement and daily involvement, does it?
I would love to see groklaw's present state archived for posterity in a more convenient to browse format for archival purposes (also easier to mirror).
At the same time, I'd love the site to carry on analyzing legal news (PJ and contributors willing) separately.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Submit all of Groklaw's electronic publications to the Library of Congress.
They're a reliable long-term (centuries) repository of publications.
It's like the portion of the movie Forrest Gump where he finally decides to stop running and all the followers are standing around questioning.
"I'm pretty tired... I think I'll go home now." And just like that, my running days were over.
Groklaw sucks, the overwhelming politics and dirty crap pulled by PJ is unconscionable, unethical and immoral.
Delete posts because users disagree with you? for shame!
or even completely delete users and BAN them just because we pointed out you made a mistake, that's totally scummy!
Groklaw was good "back in the day", it's been totally meaningless and useless for a long time now.
Oh sure, a few bits here and there. but not really. Now we have no reason to read it any more.
Come on, deleting a post for pointing out your mistakes or disagreeing with you is totally unprofessional and unethical
I will NOT miss groklaw.
Dear Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Justice John Paul Stevens, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Justice David H. Souter, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Justice Samuel A. Alito:
We are writing to you regarding the case of Dr. Dongxiao Yue v. Sun Microsystems, et al., which is set for conference in January 2009 (Information of the case can be found at www.American-Justice.org and YouTube).
In November 2007, Dr. Yue sued defendants for pirating his PowerRPC software. Evidence included defendants' internal documents showing Sun knowingly sold unauthorized and unlimited copies of PowerRPC to others. However, in March 2008, former U.S. District Judge Martin J. Jenkins dismissed Dr. Yue's lawsuit without ruling on any of the copyright claims.
The District Court then awarded defendants $219,949.90 of attorneys' fees and costs under Section 505 of the U.S. Copyright Act.
While Dr. Yue's appeal is ongoing, on December 15, 2008, the District Court issued a Writ of Execution directing county sheriff to take possession of Dr. Yue's assets (primarily his copyrights and his family home where his two young children live), despite Dr. Yue's request for humanitarian consideration. Dr. Yue's application for stay at the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal was summarily denied without any explanation.
Awarding software pirates under U.S. Copyright Act would encourage infringement of intellectual property and would be detrimental to U.S. economy. The lower courts should have provided Dr. Yue equal protection as other American copyright owners.
We respectfully request that your Honor carefully consider Dr. Yue's arguments before the Supreme Court and make an equitable decision.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned (Click to View Sigantures)
I think this would be a good time to seek some formal honours for PJ. Granted she has all the respect she has earned from the community over the course of the SCO epic, but it would be nice to find some appropriate gesture to show her in some tangible way just how valuable we believe she is as a person.
I don't know what she includes in her formal qualifications, but an honourary doctorate from some high profile law school (whether she has an LLD already or whatnot) would probably not go astray. For that matter, I wouldn't think a Presidential Medal of Freedom would be inappropriate either, but that's just me. PJ has not been just a breath of fresh air, she's been the only air we had. To honour her appropriately for that accomplishment would also be to honour an example of where people exercised their democratic right to resist bullying by people who see the courts as just another business tool.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Let's hope this first post is preserved, so future generations will have a complete record of who had first post in this story.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Link
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
And yet the same companies that were trying to scam hobbyists into paying business rates are trying to scam websites into paying them twice for the same traffic.
Groklaw is something like an established brand name. Groklaw has been quoted - or mentioned - in many major publications, groklaw has has won many awards, and has an established reader base.
Groklaw is not just about the scox case. Groklaw has covered, in considerable depth, many legal issues relating to IT. For example the OOXML scam.
Although I would welcome PJ to write more articles, I don't think groklaw really needs PJ anymore.
As a supporter and advocate of open source software, and more importantly, the principle of openness, I don't understand how PJ can come now to the open source community in general, and veteran groklaw readers in particular, with a straight face, and claim that she is suddenly interested in preserving the so-called 'complete' record of groklaw.
This, after she has spent the last five years systematically avoiding transparency in groklaw's operations, and maintaining an iron grip on its contents by blocking access to user's comments from archive.org, and the major search engines such as google, msn, and yahoo via robots.txt. And not only has she blocked outside search engines, but she has also deliberately disabled the ability within groklaw to search for comments by author, thus making it much more difficult to see how her own comments have changed over time, and have sometimes even contradicted themselves.
I think that PJ has, through her own behavior, irreparibly harmed, if not totally destroyed, the value of groklaw as a historical reference, by her relentless exertion of absolute control over every comment posted, quickly deleting all posts that do not sufficiently toe the party line, and literally "disappearing" the accounts of some of groklaw's most valuable contributors when they dared to disagree with her even slightly. As a result, groklaw has become little more than a strident speaker on a soapbox, in the center of a large echo chamber, resounding to the shouts of "Amen!" by the true believers.
Those of you who have followed groklaw from its earliest days will remember one frequent contributor by the handle of "AllParadox", who learned firsthand how groklaw really operates. A retired attorney by his own account, his insightful posts were the product of years of legal experience, both in and out of the courtroom. In the beginning, he was one of PJ's staunchest defenders and advocates, vociferously rebuking any and all criticism of her. Then, something happened, and his posts disappeared. In an instant, he became an un-person, and all who asked about him or mentioned him also ran the risk of being made un-persons by PJ. His own comments about what happened to him on groklaw can be found here: http://messages.finance.yahoo.com/Stocks_(A_to_Z)/Stocks_S/threadview?m=tm&bn=2942&tid=383807&mid=383807&tof=10&so=E&rt=2&frt=2&off=1&p=mq611k_AWrbLlqArvKx.K_r6c55v2m5DOHmUgyxq6.J5PYFCet.LUhM-
What is perhaps even more troubling than the heavy-handed censorship of different voices on groklaw, is that PJ reportedly uses a very deceptive practice, sometimes called shadow-banning or shadow-deletion. The way that it reportedly works is to make the posts of a shadow-banned member invisible to everyone except PJ and the banned poster. Because of this, nobody except PJ can see, or know, what exactly is on any given page of the site. The version of groklaw that one ordinary user, "Alice", sees may be very different from the version that another user, "Bob", sees. This alone means that groklaw can never be taken seriously as an historical archive. An archive must have a fixed and immutable content; it cannot change itself depending on who is accessing it.
Moreover, one of the most important aspects of an archive is that it provides us with an accurate record of the nature of the *debate* about controversial issues in the past, and to show how one side won the *argument* with reasons, and persuasion. Seeing how arguments were won and lost can be very informative, and helpful to us as we face new challenges. An archive would be virtually useless if it systematically expunged one side of every argument. Indeed, it would be very Orwellian.
Over the years, when she has been questioned about her management of groklaw, PJ and he
We need Roy to combat the complacent and now laissez-faire atittude of the free software community towards the current dangers facing us now.
But you are wrong.
Groklaw is still needed beyond SCO.
The next few years we will have more needs for legalese in the FOSS world (not just When Nathan Myrvold comes calling) and they could become THE reference place for any court related news stories. Like they are now.
When the SFLC sues Verizon and Extreme Networks for GPL Infringement and you want more info, where do you go?
For most of us, Groklaw = law + FLOSS
(and let's face it, most of us hate lawyers which makes this weird)
I hope after they tie up SCO loose ends, it continues.
So write it to a DVD and get back online. How long can that take?
And check your robots.txt file to ensure that the Internet Archive keeps a backup copy as well.
And if you're extremely paranoid (given that other blogger site that just went tits-up), put a zipped searchable archive file on your site that anyone else can d/l and back up as well.
It doesn't have to be rocket science.
And print it all in a book which Google will scan and put in their digital library...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Well, Bill Gate's dad was a lawyer, after all...
Actually, society (well, the US) is running Open Source software.
It's just that instead of letting talented programmers contribute, we choose random dudes from the crowd to authorize patches. Some of them have coded, many have not. Most haven't read the original specifications document, and some refuse to.
We also randomly cut snippets of code out of the system when a sploit is discovered.
Sometimes we invite the black hats to approve code, and sometimes the patch managers are paid by the black hats to install keyloggers at random.
It's just that the kernel is (so far) stable enough that we haven't had a system crash in about 200 years. The financial drivers have created a buffer overflow, leading to a money leak, and it's playing heck with other devices that need DMA (direct money access).
Yeah but the GP wasn't really right. The court systems are only as open as you can afford. There were real costs associated with obtaining the mountains of court transcripts for Groklaw. Much of that cost was borne by a relatively small number of participants who resided near the relevant courthouses.
Without the persistent action of a small number of people and PJ's tenacity, Groklaw wouldn't have ever gotten off the ground.
In this day and age, it's a travesty court transcripts aren't published for free on the internet to be truly accessible to the public.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
As all type system people know, preservation means nothing without progress ;-)
Well, the conspiracy theory is basically:
[Exemplar International] + [MedAbility Software] + [Groklaw / Pamela Jones] = Sale of products and services
Start by reading this press release at http://www.exintl.com/web-archive/documents/2003-04-14.htm and look for CONTACT: Pamela Jones, Director, Public Affairs, MedAbiliti, +1-914-761-7423, fax - +1-866-792-5299, pjones@medabiliti.com
Then follow the conspiracy trail at http://www.exintl.com/web-archive/documents/index.html
Happy digging!
"As a supporter and advocate of open source software, and more importantly, the principle of openness"
.. :)
...
I totally believe you man, and you didn't come here to piss all over Groklaw, even though that is the impression any disinterested observer would have from reading the above
I notice in that in that example of ad hominem off-topic personal abuse you managed to not once address the contents of Groklaw viz-a-viz the legal implications of the SCO case and other attacks on the Open Source industry.
As an advocate of the 'principle of openness', are you also in favor of a 'reporter', specifically Maureen O'Gara (a known MS shill) arriving at her home, taking pictures and posting irrelevant personal information regarding Jones' religious affiliation?
Folks: he's just repeating some old PJ-censors_Groklaw fud. Notice how they take special care to not actually address the legal arguments - just go straight for the personal abuse. Always a sure sign of a shill
davecb5620@gmail.com
"It's like SCO's smear campaign has been enshrined there, which is a real distortion of Groklaw's place in history. Neither Lyons's smears or O'Gara's have any place there"
What she would like is the Wikipedia not be about the smear campaign but about the legalities of the issues. It's bit like what you and your chum are trying to do here, piss all over Groklaw. For instance if some anonymous coward came to my house and pissed in the hall, would I be guilty of censorship, if attempted to clean it up.
davecb5620@gmail.com
How much data does Groklaw really have? Sure, some of it's likely to be in bloated formats (PDFs of scanned raster images as opposed to text, etc.), but is it more than a few GB? If not a DVD, will it fit on a Blue-Ray? Put it out on Bittorrent, sell copies if you want, and put some Google ads on the main page to balance some of the costs.
Also, make sure Archive.org has a copy of the originals.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
(I'll ignore the question of whether the parent poster is ta troll, or is Darryl in disguise, or whatever.)
A couple of bloggish sites I know of, including BoingBoing, have a way of indicating moderator displeasure with comments or commentors without censoring them entirely. It's to remove all the vowels from the offending posts. You can still pretty much read them, if you're a native English speaker at least, but it's also fairly obvious that they've been spanked.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks