Mark Webbink takes over Groklaw 2.0

[Posted May 16, 2011 by corbet]

Pamela Jones has used her last full-time day at Groklaw to announce that Mark Webbink will be running the show from here. "Now that the battlefield has shifted from SCO attacking Linux to Microsoft using patents against it and from servers to mobiles, I realized that Groklaw needs a lawyer at the helm. So I asked Mark Webbink if he would take on this role, and I'm thrilled to tell you that he has accepted. He is the new editor of Groklaw as of today. Mark was General Counsel at Red Hat, as you know, and he is on the board of the Software Freedom Law Center. He is also a law professor, which as I'll explain is a vital piece of what he has planned. Mark is a visiting professor at New York Law School where he runs the Center for Patent Innovations, oversees the Peer To Patent project run with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, has been active in seeking reform of the U.S. patent system, and teaches patent licensing."

Mark Webbink takes over Groklaw 2.0

Posted May 16, 2011 18:49 UTC (Mon) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] (4 responses)

On this day of transition I actually have two positive things to say about Groklaw. Seriously, not ironically.

I found Mark Webbink's article last week on Oracle vs. Google very balanced; it also contained an interesting revelation on failed negotiations between Oracle and Google.

Today I saw PJ's comments in a news pick on Lodsys, making reference to Lodsys's example of nails having a price, thus arguing they're also entitled to royalties from mobile app developers on their patents. The way PJ explained the problem with software patents on the basis of that "nails" example hits the nail on the head.

Mark Webbink takes over Groklaw 2.0

Posted May 16, 2011 19:21 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (3 responses)

Post a link or it didn't happen! Come on, Florian, none of us are your butler: a few seconds in your browser history is all it takes.

pboddie, your attack is baseless

Posted May 16, 2011 19:25 UTC (Mon) by FlorianMueller (guest, #32048) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't link to PJ's news pick because the comments appear only in the News Pick column and on a related page, but there's no such thing as a permanent link to those News Pick comments. That's Groklaw's limitation, not my fault. So be more reasonsable, pboddie.

pboddie, your attack is baseless

Posted May 16, 2011 23:16 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

It isn't an attack, and you don't deserve any credit for trying to portray it in that way. All I asked is that you link to the stuff you read so that we can read it as well. "PJ's comments in a news pick on Lodsys" could mean a lot of things: stuff on her own site, stuff on someone else's site where she gets to make a statement (you're surely familiar with that), stuff on Reddit, and so on.

I don't read Groklaw - nice to see that you've started to use the actual name of the site again - so I'm not familiar with any unusual behaviour in that site's content management, and thus requesting the URL would hardly be unreasonable, even if I had deduced that you were specifically talking about content on that site.

Even quoting directly would have been acceptable by the licence of the site's content. We could then have used our own judgement if anyone reading might have had some doubt about whether the quote was genuine.

Mark Webbink takes over Groklaw 2.0

Posted May 16, 2011 19:57 UTC (Mon) by knobunc (guest, #4678) [Link]

The LWN link to the Webbink article: http://lwn.net/Articles/442589/

For the PJ quote, you have to search for Lodsys on this page: http://www.groklaw.net/newsitems.php

Mark Webbink takes over Groklaw 2.0

Posted May 17, 2011 2:58 UTC (Tue) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link]

I am extremely pleased that Webbink will be taking over Groklaw. I met Webbink on multiple occasions during my years at Red Hat and trust his intentions and judgment implicitly. There perhaps cannot be a better person to take over Groklaw.