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Bittersweet news from Groklaw: mission accomplished, signing off
- FlorianMueller 16y agoIt remains to be seen whether this is true, or just a scheme to provoke an outpouring of support ("support" in various ways, shapes and forms).
- arkitaip 16y agoWhat exactly are you insinuating?
- bodski 16y agoInteresting, you seem to already harbour ill feelings toward Groklaw: http://lwn.net/Articles/401923/ http://lwn.net/Articles/401923/
- orangecat 16y agoIt's nothing personal, he's just doing his job: http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/ http://lwn.net/Articles/434587/
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- T-R 16y agoFor those not familiar with the above poster's relation to Groklaw: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091021164738392 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20091021164738392 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100408153953613 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100408153953... http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110122054409107 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110122054409107 Edit, for a little more context: http://twitter.com/FOSSpatents http://twitter.com/FOSSpatents
- burgerbrain 16y ago"I never drink beer" --FlorianMueller (http://lwn.net/Articles/402113/ http://lwn.net/Articles/402113/) Really explains a lot in my humble opinion. (Not necessarily the not drinking of beer, but the rather unnecessary pointing out that he doesn't drink beer)
- _delirium 16y agoA German who doesn't drink beer? Stereotype ruined!
- VMG 16y agoI have to admit I need a tldr here
- T-R 16y agoHis wikipedia article is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Mueller http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florian_Mueller In short, he and the author of Groklaw have opposing viewpoints regarding various software patent cases, including the Google v. Oracle case, and have been very directly criticizing each other. Groklaw has accused him of spreading FUD, and its readers have accused him of being sponsored to do this (see orangecat's link below), while Mr.Mueller has accused Groklaw of lying and attacking him to get attention.
- jedsmith 16y ago> Mr.Mueller has accused Groklaw lying and attacking him to get attention. There is no shortage of irony in that statement.
- tzs 16y agoYour first link is to an article that cites no real sources that actually back up what the article claims. The external sources it cites either do not say what it claims they say, or they are opinion pieces with no cites to their sources. Most of the cites, however, are just links to early articles on the same site that similarly lack any basis. The standard MO of that site is to make up something, occasionally even actually labeling at as speculation. Then in later articles they mention it in passing, just saying they have written about it before, and citing back. Then in still later articles, they mention it as fact, and cite one of their secondary articles.
- jedsmith 16y agoJealous? Forget what an outpouring of support feels like? Or do you just never pass up an opportunity to divide people and call attention to yourself, in a quest to remain relevant?
- rayiner 16y agoGroklaw filled a huge void. Done by someone who is a proponent of free software but also knowledgable about the law. As similar debates rage on in copyright and patent spaces, I think the need for that perspective will remain. We don't need more commentary from folks who don't know what the patent act §101 bars are. We need folks who understand the legal framework and can advocate for consumer rights within that framework. Hopefully someone steps in to fill PJ's shoes.
- grellas 16y agoGroklaw has been a fantastic resource, reporting on important legal developments affecting IP with a depth, sagacity, and honesty that is not easily found elsewhere. I strongly second the idea that this leaves a huge void. It will take a lot to fill it.
- cooldeal 16y agoI know the following sentiment will not be popular here, but here I go anyway(bye bye karma). I really liked Groklaw in the SCO days but after that it seems to have degenerated into a place for Microsoft haters. I do not know if her investigations led her to seeing a Microsoft shadow everywhere but it felt like too much of a witch hunt to me, along with related sites like boycottnovell.com (now techrights.org). And Apple almost always gets a free pass even if they attack 'open'. Even her last post is a microcosm of this. >But the world has moved from computers and desktops to mobile and the cloud. Now it's Microsoft and all its venal little helpers and proxies attacking Google and Android....No matter what tricks Microsoft may pull going forward, the world knows now that when there was free choice in the marketplace, people chose Android, which runs on Linux, over Microsoft's phone. Nothing they do can change that. All they can prove perhaps is that dirty tricks and misuse of the courts and regulatory bodies can distort the marketplace. But without the benefits of a monopoly, people don't actually choose Microsoft phones, at least not in comparison to Android. All they can do about that now is try to force you to use their products.That's in a way what a monopoly is. People did not choose Android because it was open or because it was Linux. They choose it because the devices had multitouch capacitative screens(same as the iPhone) and ran on non AT&T carriers while Windows Mobile devices had resistive screens forcing use of a stylus and were not touch friendly, didn't have proper GPUs, suffered fragmentation etc. Windows Phone 7 is a total ditching of the old paradigm and a fresh start, but it came quite late and is facing an uphill battle against the network effects(yes, the same network effects that a monopoly or duopoly entail). If it was around when Android started, it could've been a very different market now, regardless of PJ's ramblings about monopolies. The new Windows phones are actually not bad compared to Androi but are missing many features. How can she declare victory for Android when WP7 has been barely out 5 months yet? Interesting to see that she sweeps under the carpet things like Apple filing patent lawsuits against Android phones, and Jobs insinuating that Android is for porn. I sometimes feel that she plays to her primarily anti-MS audience, especially to keep things interesting to them after the SCO case ran out of gas but at the same time cannot criticize Apple too much even if deserved since that would anger the pro-Apple portion of the crowd. In short, while the legal analysis was great, the bias, witch hunts and paranoia got too overwhelming once the SCO case stopped being interesting and it was the time that I stopped reading it regularly and I've seen some people who share this sentiment so I am not alone on this. Microsoft is definitely not an angel, but to obessively see it as a devil behind everything is a bit too much.
- frossie 16y agoBig shame. While in the SCO case groklaw was useful as an information source and an advocacy conduit, I feel there is a need for detailed coverage on court cases that revolve around technical issues or major technical players, even if there is no obvious position to advocate for. I hope somebody else can take up the torch.
- evangineer 16y agoPJ is very knowledgeable and well respected. She also ran groklaw on a voluntary basis at a great cost in terms of time and energy. In some sense, she will probably feel that she's getting her life back.
- FlorianMueller 16y agoThe big battles are now about software patents, not copyright, and particularly take place in connection with mobile devices: http://www.scribd.com/my_document_collections/2770688 http://www.scribd.com/my_document_collections/2770688 I never intended for my FOSS Patents blog to be a discussion community like Groklaw, but I do cover those issues and try to help a broader audience understand the strategic battlelines, such as with the visualizations available in the above folder.
- wtallis 16y agoIs the Sony mess not important? It's all about copyrights and license agreements, and it seems like it could have major repercussions for the right to run the software of your choosing on hardware that you own. (Not to mention the horrible privacy precedents Sony is trying to set with their subpoenas.) I'm not saying that the software patent issues aren't big, but they're battles between corporate giants, and will have limited effect on developers until most of them are settled. The Sony cases, on the other hand, could mean that you would need the manufacturer's permission before putting free software on the hardware they sold you. Most companies selling hardware would love for that to be the case, but it would make it nearly impossible for open-source communities to form around consumer hardware.
- jdp23 16y agoThere's an art to knowing when to move on. Congrats to PJ and kudos to groklaw!
- tzs 16y agoGroklaw was very useful for getting documents out, and explaining procedural things. Basically, the practical aspects of law. Even when a legal document is public domain, it often requires someone with access to a for-pay system to find it, grab it, and put it up on free site. The analysis side of Groklaw, on the other hand, was so-so, especially the farther it got away from actual legal issues. I'd like to see a site that gathers legal documents related to the same kinds of issues Groklaw covered (and more, perhaps) and makes them available for free, but that either does not do analysis and editorializing the way Groklaw does, or that has several independent people providing analysis from a wide variety of perspectives.
- unfasten 16y ago>I'd like to see a site that gathers legal documents related to the same kinds of issues Groklaw covered (and more, perhaps) and makes them available for free, This is the goal of RECAP. It's a Firefox extension that will automatically upload documents you view from PACER (the for-pay system to access documents) to a public internet archive. It will also let you know if free versions of the files for a case you're looking up are already available. You can also search the already available documents, without the extension, here: http://archive.recapthelaw.org/ http://archive.recapthelaw.org/ Firefox extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recap-195534/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/recap-195534/ Their 'About' page also has a FAQ if you're interested in more about how it works: https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/ https://www.recapthelaw.org/about/
- dws 16y agoThere's some pretty good legal analysis and discussion in the Groklaw comment threads, once you sort out who to follow. Groklaw is an interesting model in how to manage community discussions. Having an explicit "Off Topic" section on each post does seem to quarantine a lot of dreck.
- Valour 16y agoI'm really, really glad. Fuck Groklaw. Groklaw was like a big, angry shark gobbling up all of the material that a half-dozen journalists in open source and technology journalism would have loved to cover, had they not been emasculated by editors who were in love with PJ. It was a big ego game for her, not to achieve fame, but to achieve some level of personal satisfaction. It was always my hunch that she was filling some empty void in her life with Groklaw -- mommy and daddy made her feel useless, so Groklaw was her way of fighting back. Or she had an abusive husband and Groklaw was her only power in the world. Whatever. It doesn't matter now. Apparently all the PJ lovers missed the posts where she promoted religion, and called for the censorship of OSTG/OSDN journalists because NewsForge published an editorial about being okay with using proprietary software, and told people that it wasn't okay for kids to believe in Santa Claus. PJ executed hit jobs on anyone who publicly disagreed with her or her ideology. She reveled in that power. She had the entire tech journalism establishment by the balls, and she wasn't afraid to use that to satisfy her personal vendettas. Anybody who questioned PJ in the least was accused from every angle of being a Microsoft or SCO shill, or taking money from some front company. Anyone who asked who PJ was and how she was making her living (perfectly valid questions -- the same ones she asked of everyone who spoke out against her or did anything she didn't like) was subjected to an Anonymous-style attack from her community of blind followers. One person even claimed to have been the victim of arson at the hands of a Groklaw fan, but nobody could print those stories because PJ had a stranglehold on the tech news publishers. Nobody was allowed to publish anything about Groklaw. Except of course the one rogue publication that did the same thing to PJ that she did to her enemies. PJ deserved what Maureen O'Gara dished up to her -- and more. There were so few actual journalists in that industry anyway... everyone was either starfucking Groklaw and promoting Linux and the FSF with fluff pieces, or they were prevented by editors from chasing stories that showed those shadow-gods in a negative light. Had Groklaw never existed, open source and Linux journalism would have been so much better for it... there would have been real story-chasers, not free software worshippers and fanboys.
- FlorianMueller 16y agoYou make a lot of good points but overstate Groklie's influence on the professional press. It came down to a few journalists who wanted to present themselves to their audiences as open source activists. Serious media didn't care. A few days ago, I was quoted on Google's $900M bid for Nortel's patents by the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, BBC News, law.com, and on Android's patent problems by Bloomberg. I started my FOSS Patents blog only a year ago. Did Groklaw ever get quoted by media like that? I can't remember having seen that ever. That doesn't mean that it hasn't happened, but I'm not aware of any example.
- ErrantX 16y agoSad. Kudos. I've only ever come across Groklaw on HN, it's not a blog I've ever kept up with regularly (my loss). But every memory I have of Grok' content is of competent, sensible and inciteful commentary. The SCO stuff kinda passed me by, mostly because I ''assumed'' it was purely frivolous and would be beaten. It is only on the prompting of this post that I dug into the archives and saw the work that was done. But, kudos for sticking to the idea of switching off once done. I have the perennial XKCD cartoon above my desk about someone being wrong on the internet (see: http://xkcd.com/386/ http://xkcd.com/386/), too often I ignore it. Anyone that can do so has my respect. ''In short, we dood it, y'all.'' Amen :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- malkia 16y agoNever been there much (groklaw), but remember how sad I was the day flipcode.com closed :( Still the archives are there, and I keep reusing things from the code sections...
- FlorianMueller 16y agoDon't forget the dark side of Groklaw -- censorship: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/groklaw-accused-of-censorship/7826 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/groklaw-accused-of-cen...
- wtallis 16y agoPlease, when you link to an editorial titled "Groklaw accused of censorship", have the integrity to note that you're the accuser. And don't use childish epithets like "GroklXX" and "Groklie" and still expect to be taken seriously on a forum like this.
- FlorianMueller 16y agoThe ZDNet article concerning Groklaw's censorship quoted a plurality of persons, not just me. I was one of them, but there were several others.
- albedoa 16y ago"I will have no such integrity."
- FlorianMueller 16y agoOn LWN, a user pointed out that text analysis tools show that some Groklaw articles were definitely written by male authors and others definitely by female authors: http://lwn.net/Articles/437741/ http://lwn.net/Articles/437741/ This is yet another clear indication that "PJ" was just an avatar.
- daeken 16y agoI have run text analysis tools against nearly everything I've written. Well over 75% of my writing is identified as likely to be female. Last I checked, I'm male. Don't put so much stock in this stuff.
- sambeau 16y agoI wish a few more campaign groups would have the decency shut-up-shop when they achieve their stated mission. (but not before, obviously) It shows a genuine integrity which enhances their legacy.