Groklaw shutting down in May

There is a bit of a difference between large entities like broadcasters and newspapers, where the reputation of the entity as a whole lends some value (or not) to the individual articles, and a website that appears from nowhere and seems to deliberately make it difficult to establish who is behind it and what their prior reputation might have been.

> This is an argument that I find a bit hard to believe. If an article
> is well written or not is not something that depends on if someone
> has actually met that person in real life.

"Well written" can mean spelled correctly, factually correct, etc; for those attributes it's not necessary to know who wrote it. But the important issues with stories like SCO is "am I being told everything?", "do others have another interpretation of that?", etc. To be able to judge that sort of thing, we can look at the author's background and try to get a first-hand impression of what sort of person they are.

Just look at all the posts on LWN where people ask, "Dear Florian, please tell us who pays you so that I can decide whether to believe what you have written on your blog." I think that's a legitimate question to ask, and I also ask it of Groklaw.