Groklaw shutting down in May [LWN.net]

Groklaw shutting down in May

Posted Apr 10, 2011 21:54 UTC (Sun) by frnknstn (guest, #68647)
In reply to: Groklaw shutting down in May by FlorianMueller
Parent article: Groklaw shutting down in May

Thank you for telling us about that Wikipedia page! I honestly had no idea who you are. (Of course, I know who PJ is.)

From your Wikipedia page, I saw a link to this story, attributed to you:
http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/03/googles-android-f...

Then I realised /exactly/ who you are. You are one of the guys who was claiming that Google infringed on Linux's copyrights, because their libc replacement used kernel headers.

I think that's the crux of your confusion: It doesn't matter if PJ is real, or fake. It doesn't matter if she's a woman, man, space alien, shill, or a fat dude in his underwear posting from his mom's basement. It doesn't matter if she was mean to your friends. And it doesn't matter that you have pals at a game company, excel at shameless self-promotion on a self-promotion website, or that you gave legal advice to Real Madrid.

Hell, it wouldn't even matter if you played in goal for Real Madrid.

What matters is that PJ and Groklaw, for the most part, GOT THINGS RIGHT. To a society that aspires to be a meritocracy, like the Linux community does, that is the most important thing. Maybe the harsh reactions to your friend's more measured words were extreme, or even sensationalist. Maybe she should have hedged her bets more. Maybe her style of writing misrepresented how skilled the "bad guy's" lawyers were, misrepresented how close or complicated the case was.

That was all due to what PJ actually is.

She isn't a big-shot lawyer, or some kind of Nobel peace prize winner like you. She wasn't a high-paid 'analyst', and I have no idea if she is some kind of lawyer-wannabe like you so cruelly said. (As an aside, that comment actually made me think you were some kind of fake, a troll using a fancy name to get legitimacy, hoping to prop up his arguments with some grand imagined past. The level of presumtion required to assume that every paralegal secretly wants to be you is almost unfathomable.)

You, sir, may be a better lawyer than PJ will ever be, but she is a better at what she is in that blog: a journalist, whose insights into both law and open source provided correct commentary for the rest of us. That is why Groklaw will be rightly missed.

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Groklaw shutting down in May

Posted Apr 11, 2011 1:20 UTC (Mon) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (5 responses)

I'm about as big a fan of FM as most people here - he seems quite adamant to promote himself and doesn't like PJ or groklaw much. But he has a point - an anonymous harping on a variety of companies with all kinds of arguments which sometimes make sense, sometimes seem like the ones by the monkeys at boycottnovell.com - doesn't inspire confidence in me. Who is paying PJ? That's something I'd love to know. Apple? Intel? Sony? Microsoft, maybe?

I've never been very interested in legal stuff so I didn't read Groklaw religiously, but I've read most of what was linked from LWN - and mostly it was interesting to me. Usually I knew not enough of the background to comment on it in any intelligent way - so I took the truth for granted.

But I've now seen a few articles I DID have background on, and boy, were they uninformed, silly ranting. So frankly, I don't take Groklaw serious anymore - if the articles I did NOT know much about are as silly as the ones I DID know about, well, it's not worth much.

(it's similar to the science page of most newspapers - ever seen them comment on IT? If the rest of the articles are as stupid as those, well, I don't think they're worth reading anymore. I just hope they're not)

Groklaw shutting down in May

Posted Apr 11, 2011 1:23 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

"Who is paying PJ? That's something I'd love to know."

Sure but if someone is raising such questions, they need to disclose who they are getting paid by as well especially if there is a potential conflict of interest. In that sense, it is ironic to see who is being very loud about it.

Groklaw shutting down in May

Posted May 30, 2011 14:48 UTC (Mon) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't see any irony? Google my name and you know who's paying me. Ok, until 8 months ago I didn't make that very clear as the dutch government of education isn't exactly a relevant source of income for what I did in KDE...

Groklaw shutting down in May

Posted May 30, 2011 15:40 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I was talking about the OP and not you.

Groklaw shutting down in May

Posted Apr 11, 2011 10:34 UTC (Mon) by csamuel (✭ supporter ✭, #2624) [Link]

> Who is paying PJ?

Groklaw accepts donations via PayPal and also has a CafePress shop. In light of all this unnecessary hand-wringing over PJ perhaps the "I'm PJ" mousepad might make a nice gift for people.. ;-)

http://www.cafepress.com.au/cp/moredetails.aspx?productNo...

Groklaw shutting down in May

Posted Apr 11, 2011 12:33 UTC (Mon) by frnknstn (guest, #68647) [Link]

Call me a romantic, but I find the idea of a lone-gun blogger who is a paralegal by day, and an injustice fighter by night. Apple, Intel, Sony, Microsoft and Google are all big companies, but I suspect the number of paralegals they employ is far less than those employed by all the legal firms in the US. Who is paying PJ? I really think the most likely answer is 'nobody'. (After all, most blogs are run by nobodies :)

The quality of reporting in specialist fields always seems to be poor to terrible. I am a big fan of badscience.net, and all the great work it's owner does to identify poor medical journalism practices.

I think that groklaw is a bit better than most sources; as you say, IT-related stories in newspapers are appaling, but groklaw's coverage is better than them, at least. I also prefer silly, uninformed ranting to coverage that serious, informed, but just plain wrong.

I also didn't follow groklaw's coverage, except when linked to from one of my regular news sites. Perhaps some of the silliness was already filtered out for me. If it isn't too much trouble, I would like to see a link of a groklaw story you take objection to.