Groklaw shutting down in May

PJ's reputation stands or falls on Groklaw. Nothing more, nothing less. Not on who she is, what gender or nationality nor who her parents were nor who employed her.

I spent some time over at Groklaw defending you. I now regret this.

Groklaw was right in many things, and a forum for rather open debate. At the very least, it was their right to publish at their site what they believed. You might at least acknowledge the enormous effort and value that the site represented.

Instead, I read yet another smear attack. And this is an open one. Use your own blog for that, not LWN.

I stopped reading more than the summary from groklaw a long time ago simply due to the "tl;dr" syndrome, so I am pretty sure I was not influenced by PJ.

IMO Enderle is biased. Quite unethically so.

I will, however, freely admit that all this is more than 2-3 years old, so if you ask me to show examples I will probably have to dig a lot.

What is your expertise? Programming? How does that qualify you to spout opinions on the GPL, a legal document? You have a bad reputation because you too often speak before you think. Groklaw has embarrassed you in the past because they did the research that you should have done. In other words, they did your job.

Groklaw speaks for itself. It has had a positive effect in the open source world and the legal world. It has earned respect because of its integrity.

You do everyone disrespect by suggesting that PJ has some unnatural influence on them.

As for not coming out in public. Society does not respect the privacy of "public" individuals. They can not go out in public and do the ordinary things that we lesser folk get to enjoy. They have to endure mob scenes, strangers being overly familiar in public places, and even death threats. None of these things help get the work done and the work is the only thing of real importance here. I would like to know the real reason that you need to know who PJ is? The fact is that you do not need to know who PJ is.

So leave PJ alone and go back to your fudding.

We *should* distrust people like Dan Lyons. (Maureen O'Gara also tends to write pro-MS stories). The guy wrote an entire article with information given to him by SCO without verifying that any of that information was true. He did the right thing by apologizing about it but the damage was done. If he had done his job it might have tempered some of the crazy FUD that was thrown around in the early days instead of fueling the concern that all of F/OSS and Linux was going to get hammered by SCO.

Easily. She told us stuff, we went away and fact-checked (well, I did anyway), we found out that she was correct, rinse and repeat.

Since when is reputation intrinsically linked to having an employer? I know several unemployed people (ex-students in search of a job, mostly) who I would absolutely trust as sources of information. And, on the other hand, there are a lot of gainfully-employed fully-qualified lawyers who I wouldn't trust if they told me the sky was blue.

"The problem is that Groklaw has constantly tried to capitalize on many people's desire for simple fairy-tale-like black-and-white views."

I can't speak for anyone else, but personally I got an order of magnitude more sophisticated in my understanding of law when I started reading Groklaw.

"The net effect of that big brainwashing effort is that some of the more credulous and less informed people now distrust a very smart analyst like Rob Enderle, very smart journalists like Maureen O'Gara and Dan Lyons, or a very smart author like Ed Bott, only because they comment on certain issues with greater sanity than Groklaw."

I haven't followed Groklaw regularly in a while, and my memory is a bit hazy. Could you link to examples of "character assassination", so we can check for ourselves whether or not it was justified?

The only one of the authors you mention who rings an instant bell is Maureen O'Gara - wasn't she the one who tried to "out" PJ by posting what was allegedly her ageing mother's home address?

I remember that PJ never had any qualms about sneering at people she thought were talking garbage (especially if they had a financial interest in the situation). But to me at the time her comments mostly seemed appropriate - I recall that, whenever I checked what people had actually written, I felt PJ's criticisms were deserved. As I say, though, that was a long time ago for me.