Recommended reading -- itWire -- Groklaw: the good, the bad, the ugly

Recommended reading -- itWire -- Groklaw: the good, the bad, the ugly

I recommended Bruce Byfield's "eulogy" and there's now another link worth sharing: Sam Varghese of iTWire in Australia wrote this two-page article on Groklaw

Sam recently did email interviews with Free Software luminaries, and his email address has the "gnubies.org" domain. He's a GNU activist, but as a journalist he tries to do a good job. Here are some of the best quotes from "Groklaw: the good, the bad, the ugly":

"a wildly partisan mob that cheered as each disclosure that made SCO seem unlikely to prevail was published." <- description of what Groklaw's audience was like in the early years

"There are legions who praise it as an outstanding work of journalism which it very definitely is not." <- absolutely correct, and Sam explains why

"But then Groklaw, which was often suspected of being funded by IBM, never divulged its source of funding either [...] if Jones had divulged the source of her funding - there had to be someone paying the bills as it was a full-time occupation maintaining and writing for Groklaw - then it is highly unlikely that the website would have had anything like the status it enjoyed during its tenure."

"a great deal of the coverage of matters FOSS comes from groupies - people who exhibit uncritical acceptance of the genre and all that it involves"

"One other negative aspect of Groklaw was the shrill, self-righteous tone adopted by Jones - the I-am-right-and-the-rest-of-the-world-is-wrong attitude [...]"

" Her approach often smacked of childishness."

"[...] has outlived its usefulness; calling time is an acknowledgement of this"

Note: you can avoid this step in the future by logging into your LWN account.