5 ms·

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.
        Nursie 5y ago
        Linux wasn’t bootstrapped from Minix in any meaningful way though, even if it was inspiration (and that would be quite a claim to make given Minix is a microkernel design and linux is a monolith), and Andrew Tannenbaum weighed in on that at the time. Further, it wasn’t just lack of attribution - specific allegations of copying were made as well as appeals to incredulity - one person could never write an OS! It must all be stolen! He was flat out wrong and he put his efforts into spreading FUD about it while taking money from Microsoft, all while the SCO stuff was going on. It’s very hard to see his efforts as anything other than paid-for propaganda.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I also could tell PJ's "voice" apart from others'. At the end of her hiatus, she wrote some articles without mentioning that it was her, and I could still tell.

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.
      - Nursie 5y ago
        Linux wasn’t bootstrapped from Minix in any meaningful way though, even if it was inspiration (and that would be quite a claim to make given Minix is a microkernel design and linux is a monolith), and Andrew Tannenbaum weighed in on that at the time. Further, it wasn’t just lack of attribution - specific allegations of copying were made as well as appeals to incredulity - one person could never write an OS! It must all be stolen! He was flat out wrong and he put his efforts into spreading FUD about it while taking money from Microsoft, all while the SCO stuff was going on. It’s very hard to see his efforts as anything other than paid-for propaganda.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I also could tell PJ's "voice" apart from others'. At the end of her hiatus, she wrote some articles without mentioning that it was her, and I could still tell.