Slashdot Mirror
Groklaw Turns Ten
Founded just to cover the SCO/Caldera UNIX lawsuits back in 2003, Groklaw has proven itself a great place to read and discuss many of the major tech trials since. And today, it turns ten: "We made it. A decade of Groklaw as of today. Who'd a thunk it?
Not I.
When I started, I thought I'd do a little fiddling around for a couple of months to learn how to blog. But then all you guys showed up and taught me some important things that I didn't know, and vice versa I hope, and here we are, on our 10th anniversary, still going strong, together on a very different path than I originally imagined. The important moment for me was when I realized the potential we had as a group and decided to try to surf this incredible wave all of you created by contributing your skills and time. I saw we could work as a group, explain technology to the legal world so lawyers and judges could make better decisions, and explain the legal process to techies, so they could avoid troubles and also could be enabled to work effectively to defend Free and Open Source Software from cynical 'Intellectual Property' attacks from the proprietary world."
This despite a smear campaign by SCO and nearly shutting down in 2009. And it's archived in the Library of Congress.
The judicial process has a lot of say-so in our digital lives these days. Groklaw is and will remain an important bastion of freedom when there's an issue of dangerous legal precedent at stake. I think it's a much more powerful platform than WTP, because most of the petitions on WTP are ignored or answered with a form letter and put to bed. At Groklaw you can contribute to fighting the folks who want a quarter every time you make a device with rounded corners, or every time you call fopen() on a UNIX clone.
Oh, and: I hate software patents. That is all.
It's always nice to have someone follow and translate the legalese for the rest of us.
Here's to another 10 years!
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I read groklaw regularly and get a lot out of it. It chaps my ass that I feel like it is useful and helpful to know all that legal crap. (I just want to code.) There is a bit of a cult of personality over there on groklaw which can be off-putting at times, but Pamela has done a damn good job. Kudos to you Pamela. You have made a difference.
I wish someone would put together a final analysis of the fiaSCO and all of the players. There was a lot of underground activity that Groklaw did not cover fully such as Yarro, Robbins, the 'suicides', the message board trolls (Merkey?) etc.
It would be great to see interviews from the perspective of the last rats off the ship and how they feel about the whole thing. By this time there has to be people ready to tell the real story.
There's a book waiting to be written here.
Well it was started just for the SCO fiasco and when SCO lost big time, there wasn't a need to keep it going. She wanted to move on like any of us. Luckily she found someone she could trust to keep it going.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.