Groklaw shutting down in May

For all of Florian's comments complaining about PJ's anonymity (and I'm sorry, it all looks too much like the pro-SCOX FUD over on the Y! stock board), what Groklaw managed to do brilliantly was deconstruct the FUD campaign by SCOX around their $699 SCOsource scam. Only a handful of small businesses ended up getting stuck, and events proved out that (a) there was no infringing UNIX code in Linux (When the judge says "Is that all you've got?", it's a *very* bad sign, folks) (b) SCOX never held the copyrights to begin with (c) SCOX had to honor the Novell contract terms and "un-cancel" IBM's paid-off licensing deal.

I tried the Caldera distro back in the day when My Employer of the time provided a free copy to us: not bad, but not worth their fees. After a dozen years at The Deathstar, seeing the SysV codebase used as a legal blackjack by these fools was offensive, and having seen the various UNIX-like x86 OS' of the 80s (who remembers Coherent? Idris? etc etc), SCOX' claim that Linux could only have grown by plagiarism was a joke from the start. My contention from the outset has been that they filed their case vs. IBM as a last-ditch effort to stay afloat, expecting to get paid off to go away quietly. After actually being called to prove their point, it's been a game of dodging the bullet ever since. Now it looks like it's finally ending.

PJ is doing a Cincinattus on us, putting down her pen and going back to RL; good luck to her in whatever she does, and my thanks for her efforts.

SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!