4 ms·
I 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
by cooldeal 16y ago
I 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.
- contextfree 16y agoI agree completely, but think you should've done without the "disclaimer" at the beginning - that always comes off as whiny (or egotistical - a martyrdom complex).
- wtallis 16y agoI think the conspiracy theories, etc. were certainly bothersome, but they were far from overwhelming. It's important to keep in mind that basically nobody is in the business of following and publicly reporting on Microsoft's money trail, so in recent years we've only had weak evidence for their ties to SCO and their influence over the ISO standardization of OOXML. The myriad other possibilities probably were never investigated enough to have a chance of leaving the crackpot realm. We're left with only shreds of evidence, like certain lawyers being shared by everybody trying to undermine the GPL with a lawsuit, and Novell's IP being bought by a consortium that Microsoft put together. To me, the greatest immediate loss is her reporting on Sony's legal activities. Even Ars Technica has not gone to the level of depth that PJ's analysis has, and I don't think anybody else has been diligent about tracking what Sony says in prosecuting Hotz vs. defending against the class action. There have also been several occasions where PJ has been the one to dampen sensationalism by not taking the legal filings at face value (eg. the accusations that Hotz had fled the country, or that Sony had a smoking-gun match for his serial number and IP address).
- FlorianMueller 16y agoDuring all those years Groklie never once criticized IBM for any of its wrongdoings. In connection with IBM's software patent threat letter to TurboHercules, Groklie even said in a headline that IBM was "free to sue the pants off TurboHercules". Seriously, which free software advocate would ever cheer a patent aggressor on?
- wtallis 16y agoIn the article you refer to[1], it is shown that IBM was not the aggressor, as TurboHercules filed the first complaint, and the "threat letter" was merely IBM calling their bluff: "Your suggestion that TurboHercules was unaware that IBM has intellectual property rights in this area is surprising." Furthermore, the letter was a response to a request that IBM identify any intellectual property TurboHercules infringed. Your refusal to take those facts into account is far more damning than PJ's belief that IBM's patent pledge did not cover TurboHercules. [1][http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100408153953613 http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20100408153953...]