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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."
No, seriously. Groklaw should become a patent consortium run by open source software folks. It should use its resources to fund patent applications by open source projects and should hold those patents collectively so that they can be used defensively if any of the member projects are attacked by software patents.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
So long as PJ continues to censor posts she doesn't like the site has limited value.
Ganty
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.
In effect, it would become a meta-blog, like Huffington Post...
Well, that's not necessarily a good thing judging by the number of ads and crap you find on that site. In comparison, its current version is much cleaner and nicer.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
They don't have time to be dicking around on some shitty web site.
that your only obligation is to make a profit. That being said, GO BIG PJ !!!! If anything you have gained massive respect from the open source community.
How about a place where the common man can get good defensive law advice and sharing of defense related material against big corporation mega tort scare tactics, like the one SCO tried on Novell, IBM et. al.?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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.
False. They're a HUGE problem for anything recent. Most of the concepts and technologies in open source span decades, including very new concepts as well as old ones that are covered (wrongly) by new, vague patents.
No, the goal with software patents is to make them a perpetual hazard. Vague, ill defined, and useless for actually implementing the concept in question but always useful for beating down on your enemies and keeping out potential competitors.
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.
Quote: "I also needed to take some time to think about the recent discovery about Novell taking money from Microsoft and contractually agreeing to show up at Open XML standards meetings and events. Yes, I'm furious. Or I was. I always tell you the truth. And the truth is I felt used and abused. How could Novell enter into such a deal? Then top it off with selling 882 patents to a Microsoft-organized consortium?"
This is the same Novell in 2006 that essentially sold itself into a pseudo-bondage/partnership arrangement with Microsoft, one of the most FOSS-hostile organizations that had ever existed. How can she possibly be surprised? Most leopards do not change their spots. Novell never was and never will be a real Linux/FOSS champion.
Amazing discovery: PJ is actually human! Stop the presses!
Well, duh. Of course she had to have some motivation. Do you think people 100% coldly and rationally decide to dedicate so much of their time to a purpose they are completely disengaged from?
I don't really care about her motivation. She either provides a good service to the community or doesn't, regardless of whether she's doing it out of anger, love for the cause, or some robotic need to analyze things in a 100% logical manner.
*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
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
Problem being that PJ is a basket case.... I mean that in the nicest possible way, she's a shy nerd spazz. Lovely voice, but a total paranoid shut-in. Probably got lots of cats and a glass menagerie.... People like PJ don't readily trust other people, because they don't really know any other people.
This pop psychological pseudo-diagnosis brought to you by someone posting to Slashdot. Seriously?
I mean this in the nicest possible way, of course, but Rogerborg is a total paranoid shut-in who thinks attacking nice people he's never met makes him looker smarter and 'cooler' to his basement-dwelling nerd peers.
Even if the parent poster's insulting and appalling stereotyping is spot on, his breathtakingly casual approach to openly attacking another human being would seem to confirm every 'paranoid' suspicion about humanity he accuses PJ of harboring.
~Idarubicin
"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."
PJ seems to have missed that the patents belong(ed) to Novell and they are free to do whatever they wish to do without consulting or appeasing her.
Originally I think PJ tried and others that helped her would try to be impartial and for the most part succeeded or apologized when they realized they were slanting things. The apologies got more and more sarcastic as SCO and other associated groups got worse and worse. I know from personal experience that posts pointing out slant or proposing more reasoned interpretations would be pulled from their site. Initially it was people obviously from known IPs (or so PJ said), then I got censored a few times asking her to de-rant some comments a few years ago. I got pretty jaded with her community and stopped logging in or posting, though I usually still read it for the 'news' content as much as there is. I hope she keeps going and maybe does realize their aren't really heroes and villians in corporations (though most individual FOSS developers are heroes even if they do it because they have a huge ego).
I think this disillusionment of PJ's happens with many people within FOSS as it is a worthy cause for the self-righteous as much as the anti-MSFT, but things are always murky and get increasingly disappointing as you get older and other people turn your dreams and work into their money. All companies are out for themselves, if you are lucky they may give a shit about their customers and employees (but few do). Hell, I was a significant contributor to a Linux distro for years, and now I work for MSFT. I honestly want MSFT to succeed for many reasons besides self-interest - MSFT gives a real crap about customer privacy unlike its major competitors, cares 100% about ISVs as they make its market (developers dev...), will eventually produce standardized software which can be 'cloned' and made portable, it has to compete more honestly than most big companies (which is why it attacks through other groups and politics and also usually easily exposed). And sadly, I looked at the future Google wants, the one that Apple wants, the one Oracle will stumble into, and the one MSFT wants. The MSFT one is the most open with the most changes for other people to succeed. (This assumes IBM and Red Hat continue to keep selling Oracle's Java and so will merge with it eventually).
The funny thing about corporations is that they can be bought or sold by other corporations.
In this case, Attachmate bought Novell. Once it purchased Novell, it split Novell into two units, and sold off a bunch of Novell's patent assets.
It's funny how quickly PJ is to point out how Old SCO and New SCO were different companies, but doesn't appear to recognize that old Novell and new Novell are different companies...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I've never understood why Coolidge was considered a poor president. His tenure seems exceptional and he remained popular even up to his resignation. His actions on civil rights were particularly enlightened, even though thwarted by Democrats in the legislature. Perhaps people don't like him cause he was a Republican. Who knows?
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.
Exactly. If you never expect/demand that they start behaving better why would they start?
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.
Running an open discussion site while keeping trolls at bay without deleting posts is not easy. You should try it sometime. I did, and failed.
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
If PJ regularly featured tough challenges to her worldview and responded to them with reason and nuance, then she might be credited with merely trying to create a high S/N discussion site. The impression I get from many posters to this discussion is that she simply removes the side of the debate she doesn't agree with. I'm not capable of proving that's the case. Any evidence of that would be deleted from her site. Lacking any transparency in moderation it's difficult to just take her word that nothing she deleted had any value to begin with. Those charging her with tyrannical moderation seem to be disaffected supporters more than sockpuppet trolls. There could be a conspiracy there, but we'd need evidence to believe that. Maybe if all the post IP addresses came from Darl McBride's house that would be believable. Otherwise I regard it as fanciful.
You sir/madam are implying that PJ lacks integrity because she has been forced to delete terrible posts that make Groklaw look awful.
If somebody posts something to make groklaw "look awful," then PJ, or somebody else on groklaw, can dispute that particular post.
When somebody starts deleting posts, just because those posts don't conform to her point of view, then onlookers can never be sure if the opposition has made a relevant point. I'm sorry, but that does put her integrity in question.
I find plenty of value discussion on Slashdot all the time. It would be much worse off if dissenting opinions were simply deleted, especially at the whim of a site owner.
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.
It's not a "way of thinking", it's a genuine structural problem with sharemarkets and corporate governance. Take Cadbury for example. The company did have motives other than profit -- it was founded with a particular emphasis on supporting its employees. Last year, Kraft wanted to buy Cadbury. The management wasn't keen on this, and fought it, until Kraft increased their offer very slightly. At this point, a problem with modern corporate governance kicked in. The chairman could not demonstrate that the share price would rise above Kraft's offer in the short term; that meant that strictly he could not recommend to shareholders that they should reject the offer -- he had to say that the offer was in shareholders' best interests. Many of the shareholders were pension funds. While some fund managers personally did not like Kraft taking Cadbury over much either, as managers in charge of other people's investments they didn't feel they could act against the recommendation of Cadbury's board, and so felt they had to accept the offer. So, even though nobody personally liked the deal, the requirements of everyone's role mean that they had to choose to approve the deal. This was compounded by a large number of funds that bought shares and immediately voted for the deal, because of their requirement to make money for their investors (in this case through the differential between the share price and the deal price).
Actually, I don't know in US, but in France when you found a company, you have to declare its intended goal. Develop software, create leather jewelry, build a railroad across the country...
Making money is the mean a company uses toward that goal. We live in a capitalistic society, so that means that we only consider useful endeavor the ones that will enrich some people/the society. That is an acceptable metric, but let's not confuse this imperfect metric for what it tries to measure.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
You must be new here. Corporations don't care what people want. They tell the people what to want.