Groklaw shutting down in May

Big thanks to PJ for Groklaw, she really set the standard for this kind of effort! Also good on her for being able to let go when it is time to and for knowing that there is more to life than just one cause.

Valē Groklaw!

I'm still not 100% sure that Groklaw will really shut down soon. Groklaw's announcement could be a last-gasp effort to provoke an outpouring of support (in various ways, shapes and forms) from companies and community members.

But if it actually does, which is of course very likely, the primary reason will have been that Groklaw clearly lost relevance. It was largely a "one-hit wonder" in connection with SCO, but over the last several years I think it has just become a small echo chamber -- almost like a sectarian group that unconditionally follows a mystery-shrouded leader. Seriously, who else in the whole open source context did never reveal his or her identity to the slightest extent? There was something that the person or team hiding behind the "PJ" avatar had to hide.

With an objective, rational approach it was easy to understand that "PJ" did not strike an acceptable balance between privacy and publicity. Someone who participates in highly public debates, claims to provide more transparency about suspected connections and comes up with conspiracy theories concerning people like me (although my background is well-documented and verifiable) must also present themself at some point at a public event and explain their professional background. But a lot of people thought that their "savior" should not be called into question and not be subject to the same scrutiny "she" wanted to subject others to. I always found that absurd.

When the avatar named "PJ" received an EFF award (which "she" never personally accepted in order to continue to shroud "herself" in mystery), the number of people congratulating "her" in the related discussion thread was fairly limited. When I read discussions on other topics, I also had the impression that the number of distinct participants was small.

On the occasion of the announcement of Groklaw's shutdown (which for now is just an announcement), many people appear to think only about the good that Groklaw presumably did and tend to forget its dark side: its devious censorship ("sandboxing") of user comments designed to suppress dissent and fabricate consensus in its community in the eyes of third parties.

There are other negative things to point out as well. For example, a headline that cheers a patent aggressor on ("IBM is free to sue the pants off TurboHercules") was very shocking to see almost exactly a year ago. Equally shocking was the fact that Groklaw made a demonstrably false claim about IBM's patent pledge and didn't correct the article even after user comments highlighted the "error", which was clearly intentional as far as I could see. Groklaw quoted from an IBM statement made months before the patent pledge was announced and then claimed the related statement was made "when" IBM announced the pledge (and limited its scope). Anyone who clicked on the links could actually see the dates, but Groklaw knew that most people wouldn't do so, and wanted to mislead as many people as possible. That claim was the first statement in that article on TurboHercules.

Only the small group I mentioned will truly miss Groklaw if and when it's gone. It no longer served an important purpose. More recently, Groklaw has been all about yesterday's problems. Today, the big issues connecting open source and intellectual property are primarily about patents. Groklaw often didn't see the forest because of all the trees, or it didn't want its audience to see the forest and therefore confused people with all the trees (such as absolutely irrelevant procedural detail)and set up some artifical trees in addition, including fake trees like the IBM patent pledge limitation I mentioned above.

Today's most important IP issue in this industry relates to the major smartphones disputes, and I will continue to develop material like these battlemaps and reference lists -- stuff that Groklaw never managed to do during all those years.

I'd like to thank groklaw for the service it has provided, in the form of documents, facts, transcripts and analyses sprinkled with you witty humor. I've enjoyed reading groklaw as much as I enjoy reading LWN.

Personally, I don't care whether PJ is a woman, men, or a pseudonym for the whole legal department at IBM (or wherever) :-), but I have deep respect for what PJ has done and achieved. Judging from some of the attacks she had to endure over the years, I find it understandable that you chose to remain anonymous.

With regard to comments in this LWN thread, please follows groklaw's commenting rules, especially one aspect:

"Eulogy for Groklaw" is the best article so far on Groklaw's end. I obviously disagree with the positive parts about Groklaw, but here are some fantastic quotes from it:

"in the last couple of years [i]t seemed to have passed its most effective years, and its weak points were becoming more prominent as it floundered for copy outside coverage of the SCO case."

"Among its readers, this tendency to naive paranoia became exaggerated, so that the comments became less and less worth reading."

"Still, I do think that now is the time for Groklaw to quit. It is not ending at the height of its influence, but it is ending before it slides into complete irrelevance." -> I can't agree more.

I recommended Bruce Byfield's "eulogy" and there's now another link worth sharing: Sam Varghese of iTWire in Australia wrote this two-page article on Groklaw

Sam recently did email interviews with Free Software luminaries, and his email address has the "gnubies.org" domain. He's a GNU activist, but as a journalist he tries to do a good job. Here are some of the best quotes from "Groklaw: the good, the bad, the ugly":

"a wildly partisan mob that cheered as each disclosure that made SCO seem unlikely to prevail was published." <- description of what Groklaw's audience was like in the early years

"There are legions who praise it as an outstanding work of journalism which it very definitely is not." <- absolutely correct, and Sam explains why

"But then Groklaw, which was often suspected of being funded by IBM, never divulged its source of funding either [...] if Jones had divulged the source of her funding - there had to be someone paying the bills as it was a full-time occupation maintaining and writing for Groklaw - then it is highly unlikely that the website would have had anything like the status it enjoyed during its tenure."

"a great deal of the coverage of matters FOSS comes from groupies - people who exhibit uncritical acceptance of the genre and all that it involves"

"One other negative aspect of Groklaw was the shrill, self-righteous tone adopted by Jones - the I-am-right-and-the-rest-of-the-world-is-wrong attitude [...]"

" Her approach often smacked of childishness."

"[...] has outlived its usefulness; calling time is an acknowledgement of this"

As the guy who semi-organized one of the early sites devoted to the Caldera-IBM lawsuit (TWikiWeThey's SCO wiki, since lost to server/disk and organizational scramblings), PJ did an amazing job of rallying and focusing attention on the SCO case, abstracting out legal information, crowdsourcing plain-text transcripts of recordings and image-based PDFs of legal documents, etc. I discovered how much time and effort were required just to assemble some phone transcripts, arguments, timelines, and a song.

As memory serves, Groklaw was mentioned by IBM and other anti-SCO parties as a resource for finding legal documents and arguments regarding the case. For those of us in the community, as well as the press, it was the first stop for more information.

On a tech/community note, I find it interesting that the blog approach worked somewhat better than the wiki method, at least in the early 2000s. Groklaw quickly gained more traction than we did.

My feeling is that Groklaw's bigger mission, serving as a clearinghouse for legal and business issues based around Free Software and the threats to it is valid, and it would be a Good Thing for it to continue, with or without PJ. If not, it's not the first time a mantel has been passed from one set of shoulders to another. Some of the criticisms of Groklaw (especially of Bruce Byfield's Eulogy) are accurate, and, well, blogs do have a tendency to become echo chambers. But on balance Groklaw was and is an excellent resource.

As I've noted above, I had the opportunity to correspond with whomever answers email and phone calls as Pam Jones, and I can state that she's female, personable, charming, caring, and very intelligent.

I wish her success and fulfillment in what she does from here.

Thanks tons, PJ.

- Karsten M. Self