10 ms·

I miss it but it was never the same without PJ and I hope she's been able to move on and is doing well.

by smhenderson 5y ago

willvarfar 5y ago
What happened?
- ghaff 5y ago
  https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-cause-pj-to-close-groklaw/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-cause-pj-to-c... Basically she had privacy concerns. As I recall, at least one journalist had tried to track her down in real life.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    Real cloak and dagger stuff.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Well, without reopening ancient wounds, it actually wasn't unreasonable to ask who the person behind this popular and influential anti-SCO website was. Certainly the question would have come up with a pro-SCO website. I personally know an analyst who was convinced it was a sock puppet site for one of the litigants. I don't think he was ever convinced otherwise even though a journalist friend of mine, who I absolutely trust, assured me it was a real person who was about as you would imagine. So, yeah, I believe PJ was more or less who she appeared to be. I'd also expect people would be very skeptical about such a blogger's identity under different circumstances.
      - Natsu 5y ago
        There were all kinds of questionable things going on. I read for long enough to be convinced that it really was a single person, but I think that they were skeptical because she got a lot of contributions from others who helped look into some of the legal matters, so in another sense she was the face of the Groklaw community. I don't know for sure if that was really her name, etc., because I never knew her other than online, but she had a distinct writing style that would not be easy to replicate, so she was always a single voice and she was relatively unknown, as far as I could tell, until she started getting posted to Slashdot regularly. But yes, SCO really was moving against her in the background, so she had some reason to be paranoid there.
        ghaff 5y ago
        Totally agree. My default assumption is that even if she was a fellow traveler with the anti-SCO camp, she wasn't funded although that could be naive of me. But, yes, in general there were fellow travelers with various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in deniable ways. I suspect it was a pseudonym given her concern about privacy and that being a common name, although not obviously such.
        Natsu 5y ago
        It was reported by a few journalists that Pamela Jones was her real name, but yeah, I have no way to verify that and ultimately it didn't matter, because the information was being collected and presented in public. The community could, and did, call her on it when they believed she was making motivated arguments during the TurboHeracles affair. This to my mind shows that it was really a community and not just an echo chamber.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        Nursie 5y ago
        > there were fellow travelers with various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in deniable ways. The ones that stick in my mind were a guy called Florian Mueller who seemed unreasonably determined that Linux was ‘stolen’ and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution which put out papers claiming that Linux could not have been written by Linus as operating systems are just too complex, and must have been borrowed from Minix. Both appear to have had significant Microsoft backing.
        ghaff 5y ago
        I actually knew the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution guy (Greg Fossedal) fairly well at the time and had a fairly long history with him. I don't think I ever got him to understand open source principles and he was always rather rooted in academic principles. In that vein, Linux definitely was bootstrapped from Minix but, at least arguably, there's never been a lot of formal acknowledgement of Minix' contribution to Linux. Even if everything was entirely legit from a license perspective. ADDED: In other words, Greg always most objected to the lack of citation more than anything else--which is very important in an academic context.
  - Natsu 5y ago
    Yeah, SCO was trying to depose her at one point so she ducked the subpoena (the "health break", IIRC... couldn't admit to being aware of it being served). They tried to track down her phone, etc. and there was an article of a woman with her name at one point, though I believe she disputed that it was actually her. Then the TurboHercules thing started and her position on that didn't sit well with some in the open source community since they weren't exactly real threats to open source and the shadowbans started, etc. Then she left the final goodbye note which is still up: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
    - ghaff 5y ago
      Essentially, it became a fade away or become a public figure and she chose the former. Which there's certainly nothing wrong with.
- smhenderson 5y ago
  It's complicated and I can't do it justice in a comment here. This is a pretty good summary [0] of the atmosphere near the end and some thoughts from PJ on why it all had to end, at least her part in it. [0] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
doctor_eval 5y ago
I used to read groklaw on rotation with slashdot, freshmeat and a few other sites. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot about law from it. But speaking as an outsider, something changed and it became a bit of a torches and pitchforks site. When there was a post that was basically saying “you’re either with us or you’re against us”, I had to quit. I thought PJ did a huge service to the community in the earlier days of Groklaw, it is certainly a part of the lore of Linux and the internet as a whole. Sad that it took such a toll on her.
kanzenryu2 5y ago
Never understood why somebody else couldn't take over the same sort of role. As I understood it, PJ wasn't particularly close to the case in any way, she was just interested and was collecting relevant documents and putting them on the web site. Can't we do the same sort of thing in a subreddit, or in various other locations?

I miss it but it was never the same without PJ and I hope she's been able to move on and is doing well.

willvarfar 5y ago

What happened?

ghaff 5y ago
https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-cause-pj-to-close-groklaw/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/privacy-concerns-cause-pj-to-c... Basically she had privacy concerns. As I recall, at least one journalist had tried to track her down in real life.
- Sunspark 5y ago
  Real cloak and dagger stuff.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Well, without reopening ancient wounds, it actually wasn't unreasonable to ask who the person behind this popular and influential anti-SCO website was. Certainly the question would have come up with a pro-SCO website. I personally know an analyst who was convinced it was a sock puppet site for one of the litigants. I don't think he was ever convinced otherwise even though a journalist friend of mine, who I absolutely trust, assured me it was a real person who was about as you would imagine. So, yeah, I believe PJ was more or less who she appeared to be. I'd also expect people would be very skeptical about such a blogger's identity under different circumstances.
    - Natsu 5y ago
      There were all kinds of questionable things going on. I read for long enough to be convinced that it really was a single person, but I think that they were skeptical because she got a lot of contributions from others who helped look into some of the legal matters, so in another sense she was the face of the Groklaw community. I don't know for sure if that was really her name, etc., because I never knew her other than online, but she had a distinct writing style that would not be easy to replicate, so she was always a single voice and she was relatively unknown, as far as I could tell, until she started getting posted to Slashdot regularly. But yes, SCO really was moving against her in the background, so she had some reason to be paranoid there.
      - ghaff 5y ago
        Totally agree. My default assumption is that even if she was a fellow traveler with the anti-SCO camp, she wasn't funded although that could be naive of me. But, yes, in general there were fellow travelers with various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in deniable ways. I suspect it was a pseudonym given her concern about privacy and that being a common name, although not obviously such.
        Natsu 5y ago
        It was reported by a few journalists that Pamela Jones was her real name, but yeah, I have no way to verify that and ultimately it didn't matter, because the information was being collected and presented in public. The community could, and did, call her on it when they believed she was making motivated arguments during the TurboHeracles affair. This to my mind shows that it was really a community and not just an echo chamber.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        Nursie 5y ago
        > there were fellow travelers with various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in deniable ways. The ones that stick in my mind were a guy called Florian Mueller who seemed unreasonably determined that Linux was ‘stolen’ and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution which put out papers claiming that Linux could not have been written by Linus as operating systems are just too complex, and must have been borrowed from Minix. Both appear to have had significant Microsoft backing.
        ghaff 5y ago
        I actually knew the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution guy (Greg Fossedal) fairly well at the time and had a fairly long history with him. I don't think I ever got him to understand open source principles and he was always rather rooted in academic principles. In that vein, Linux definitely was bootstrapped from Minix but, at least arguably, there's never been a lot of formal acknowledgement of Minix' contribution to Linux. Even if everything was entirely legit from a license perspective. ADDED: In other words, Greg always most objected to the lack of citation more than anything else--which is very important in an academic context.
- Natsu 5y ago
  Yeah, SCO was trying to depose her at one point so she ducked the subpoena (the "health break", IIRC... couldn't admit to being aware of it being served). They tried to track down her phone, etc. and there was an article of a woman with her name at one point, though I believe she disputed that it was actually her. Then the TurboHercules thing started and her position on that didn't sit well with some in the open source community since they weren't exactly real threats to open source and the shadowbans started, etc. Then she left the final goodbye note which is still up: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Essentially, it became a fade away or become a public figure and she chose the former. Which there's certainly nothing wrong with.
smhenderson 5y ago
It's complicated and I can't do it justice in a comment here. This is a pretty good summary [0] of the atmosphere near the end and some thoughts from PJ on why it all had to end, at least her part in it. [0] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175

doctor_eval 5y ago

I used to read groklaw on rotation with slashdot, freshmeat and a few other sites. I really enjoyed it and learned a lot about law from it. But speaking as an outsider, something changed and it became a bit of a torches and pitchforks site. When there was a post that was basically saying “you’re either with us or you’re against us”, I had to quit. I thought PJ did a huge service to the community in the earlier days of Groklaw, it is certainly a part of the lore of Linux and the internet as a whole. Sad that it took such a toll on her.

kanzenryu2 5y ago

Never understood why somebody else couldn't take over the same sort of role. As I understood it, PJ wasn't particularly close to the case in any way, she was just interested and was collecting relevant documents and putting them on the web site. Can't we do the same sort of thing in a subreddit, or in various other locations?