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Groklaw — Don't Go Home, Go Big
jfruhlinger writes "You may have caught PJ's Christmas Day post on Groklaw, expressing her anger and frustration that, after she helped save Novell's Unix patents from SCO's clutches, Novell turned around and sold many of those patents to an open source-unfriendly coalition. She's feeling at a crossroads and wondering what Groklaw should become. Brian Proffitt has a suggestion: a bigger, more community-oriented site."
Last I checked, there were several complaints of post deletions on groklaw, to which her response was she was not really interested in "open" debate. I agree with many of her opinions and analysis of the SCO debacle, but I wouldn't want to be part of any community she's running.
I'm sure she could be valuable as a writer on various IP issues surrounding free software.
So long as PJ continues to censor posts she doesn't like the site has limited value.
Ganty
Er, wait a minute... it's PJ's site right? Then PJ can do what she wants with it - including editing any posts she feels she needs or wants to. PJ's entitled to that freedom because it's her site.
So much *waaaaaing* around here anymore.
Sure, it's her site, and she can do what she wants. In response, those of us who dislike censorship in any form - whether performed by ChiComs or PJ - can point it out when the subject comes up. I'm entitled to that freedom and I intend to avail myself of it.
Fanboi worship is nice for the recipient but your position is mindless, simpering and without merit. She deserves appropriate criticism.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
The scorpion needs to get across the river, but he can't swim. He asks the frog to ferry him across. The frog refuses; he tells the scorpion that the scorpion will sting him and he will drown. The scorpion tells the frog that he won't sting the frog, because if he did, they both would drown. The frog ferries the scorpion. Midriver, the scorpion stings the frog. Before they both drown, the frog asks the scorpion, Why? The frog states: It's my nature.
Expecting gratitude from Novell is like expecting gratitude from a scorpion. The scorpion will sting, and Novell will seek to maximize profit.
I don't think Novell realized the huge bad will it has generated.
What does PJ's rights and personal freedom have anything to do with the judgment that the "site has limited value"? Maybe some people value sites more that don't censor comments.
The whole rant reads like, well, some kind of emotional rant from an angst-ridden teenager. She's "furious", and feels "used and abused. How could Novell enter into such a deal?...Why do I bother...".
The seventh paragraph alone sounds like a 13 year old's diary entry.
Is it intentional? Or does the heart find ways to justify what people want to do because they personally benefit? I leave that part to God. I can't read hearts. I analyze behavior only. But I see results. It's depressing to find out that community members are so easy to buy off, which is how I view it.
PJ has always struck me as being disingenous at best. She seems to have lost all perspective. The mission statement includes all these lofty goals and statements about legal research, being a resource, etc., etc. But if you read her own interview on how it started, she states right at the beginning that she used to hand out Knoppix CDs to Microsoft users, started Groklaw so she could learn how to blog, and then along came SCO and "it made me so angry". But she always wants to appear disengaged and "legal" and able to see both sides. What a load of self-serving rubbish.
I think you misunderstand the argument. Yes, PJ has the legal right to censor her own blog - nobody is arguing otherwise. But, she loses a lot of credibility by doing so. You have to wonder, why can't PJ's argument hold up to opposition? Everybody has to know: when you are reading groklaw forums, you are reading a one-sided debate.
DO NOT TRUST A CORPORATION!
Honestly, why would anyone? They are out for the profit line and nothing else. They are nothing like a real company that is ran by the guy or gal that started it and is chasing a dream... We need to stop thinking they are in any way benevolent. Walmart gives away basic medications because it PROFITS THEM. Companies donate to causes because it Gains them more profit in advertising. There is no soul to these things, they don't care about anything but profits.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think she fails to see the differences between people and corporations. People can be idealists, corporations exist to make money.
Check out my lame java blog at www.javachopshop.com
Maybe, I dunno, she put a lot of hard work into covering the case, so she might react a bit emotional when countless hours of tireless work were almost for nothing.
Nonsense. Her purpose was to report and analyze and enlighten the FOSS community which she did. If she was intending to have Novell give everything away, she was obviously mistaken and horribly naive.
*sigh*
If she has always struck you at being disingenuous at best (really, at *best*?), then of course it would appear to you that she's lost all perspective.
As someone who earns a living writing code on Microsoft's application stack, I'm not your total idealist when it comes to open source or free software. I do understand that there are reasons that people choose to use proprietary stuff. That said, I have a personal understanding of why free software is important, and why software patents are bad, period, that's not far removed from hers.
You're saying that because she thinks free software is better than proprietary software for her stated reasons, then she's not worth listening to. If that means that you think that the legal research she has done is not fairly representing the issues at hand, then I'd ask you to point out where we can see some evidence of that. SCO making someone angry is grounds for whatever they do afterwards to be self-serving rubbish?
That's an *awful* lot of protest over a person expressing disappointment...
I get what you're going for, it just doesn't sound likely...or impartial, for that matter.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Patent consortium? Not a big enough idea, I think. The root of the problem is that software is still patentable in the US. If not for that, Novell could not have sold out. And SCO would not have had even a veneer of credibility, and might not have tried suing anyone. Get rid of software patents.
I would like to go even further, and eliminate the government enforced monopoly protections for all patents. Don't create barriers and artificial scarcities for the sake of the starving inventors, reward them in some other way. But I can't see anything as revolutionary as that happening, certainly not anytime soon, no matter how much sense it makes. Or how terrible the current system is.
But how to achieve the more modest goal, the elimination of patents on software, and business methods? I have read there are a few crucial court cases from the 1970's where it all started. Would getting those reversed or struck down do the job? Is the Bilski case enough?
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
You have to wonder, why can't PJ's argument hold up to opposition? Everybody has to know: when you are reading groklaw forums, you are reading a one-sided debate.
I don't think that PJ has ever tried to present herself as being an impartial observer; she openly advocates for the side she feels is in the right. Why should she provide a soapbox for her opposition, who already were rather well funded and perfectly capable of providing their own platforms? I note that PJ was never invited to offer commentary on SCO's website, and no other legal expert seemed interested in presenting his own blog covering the case from poor downtrodden SCO's side.
In any event, having watched oh-so-many basement-dwelling wannabe lawyers trot out their weighty opinions on questions of law here on Slashdot, I can certainly understand why PJ - a trained legal professional - might get tired of matching wits with the unarmed. For that matter, she may just not want to let troll/countertroll flaming and bickering distract from constructive discussions and drag down the level of conversation. The sensible hostess knows when to send the belligerent, uninvited guests home.
~Idarubicin
So on one side we have a bunch of lying cheating dastardly bastards who will do anything they can (legal or not) to destroy FOSS. On the other side we have PJ who insists on allowing people to post anonymously on her site which entails the extra burden of throwing out the trash people post that is designed to discredit Groklaw.
And for this she is criticized. Give me a break. PJ is human and like all humans she is both opinionated and imperfect. Like the rest of us, she has flaws and is not always right. I imagine that while throwing out the trash she has probably deleted some posts that may not have deserved it. But by criticizing her for protecting her reputation and the reputation of Groklaw (while at the same time allowing anonymous posts) you are aiding and abetting the enemies of FOSS.
You sir/madam are implying that PJ lacks integrity because she has been forced to delete terrible posts that make Groklaw look awful. The truth is she has more integrity than almost anyone else I know (of). It is her integrity that makes the Groklaw site shine despite the fact that it is run by imperfect human beings. IMO PJ is a true hero because she maintains her integrity even though her site is constantly bombarded by posts from people who completely lack it.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
Slashdot has managed to get by fine for more than a decade without a similar deletion policy. I would prefer the distinction between troll and serious debater be left up to the reader, and not the admin. I don't want to be a part of any site that can only deal with trolls through heavy handed moderation. I think many here feel the same way. If she's been deleting posts, where is the exact line? Are we even able to see what posts were deleted to see if they deserved deletion? I doubt it. It's this lack of transparency and seeming lack of interest in open discussion that turns me off of any community she may head.
Now, PJ is hardly alone in running her site this way. But I'm a free software supporter with strong ideals and high expectations. Slashdot, for all its flaws, manages to meet these ideals. Groklaw has fallen short.
I have always found this a very American point of view. It always reads as if there is a big [PERIOD] behind it, meaning "to the exclusion of everything else". If that's true than it's just ridiculous. Corporations exist only to make money? If that would be true than we've gone seriously wrong somewhere in history. It should be all about *us*, people, living and breathing beings of flesh and blood. Corporations should exist for the benefit of society and society should exist for the benefit of the people that live in it. Our capitalist system might work best if corporations *focus* on making money, but definitely *not* to the exclusion of everything else. I think it's not too strange to demand that they do so within a certain moral and ethical framework, not passively following the boundries drwan by laws and regulations but actively seeking to be an asset to society and to its people.
I can almost hear you say "dream on", but I think it starts with chaning this way of thinking where nothing else is expected of a corporation than money, money and ever more money.
I think she fails to see the differences between people and corporations. People can be idealists, corporations exist to make money.
I am tired of hearing this argument. Corporations have a reputation to maintain and this has a real value on the balance sheet. Microsoft's bad reputation costs them everyday in the fact of other corps not wanting to do business with them and in influential consumers not recommending their products. Managers who ignore the fundamentals of serving their customers do so at their peril. We may live in cynical times, but reality will ultimately knock at the door.
Slashdot, for the most part, posts summaries and links to stories along with comments by readers, moderated and meta-moderated by readers. It doesn't do any investigative journalism, which is what Groklaw does day and and day out. The people who are investigated don't like it and will do anything they can to shut up or discredit Groklaw. Slashdot does not have significant content other than links and readers' comments which is why it can get by with the moderation system.
The idea that this reflects "strong ideals" is absurd in the extreme. If most people had similar "ideals" then content-less Slashdot would cease to function because there would be no content-ful sites to link to. If anything, it is PJ and Groklaw who are showing integrity and ideals by taking a stand for what is right and what is true. The irony is that it is because Groklaw takes a stand that people are actively trying to destroy it which in turn leads to the policy of deleting nasty posts.
It is also important to note that there has always been open invitations at Groklaw for Darl McBride, and other targets of investigation to post their side of things. These are rejected and instead Groklaw gets a flood of posts by people who are pretending to be members of the FOSS community who are trying to discredit Growlaw.
I'm not saying Groklaw is without flaws but I am saying that the deletion of posts that are designed to discredit the site is not one of them. This has nothing to do with a "lack of transparency" because the posts that are deleted do not reflect PJ or the Groklaw community. The deleted posts lack transparency because they are almost always anonymous and they are almost always by someone pretending to be a member of the community who is not.
As you may be aware, almost all content-ful sites have this problem. Do you also say "no thanks" to Google, Youtube, WaPo, the NYT, etc? Funny thing is that when you say "But I'm a free software supporter with strong ideals and high expectations" and then condemn Groklaw for doing what what is required of all sites that do investigative journalism then you start to sound very much like either a stupid friend of FOSS or a sly enemy.
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin