LWN: Comments on "Groklaw shutting down in May"

Groklaw shutting down in May

rahulsundaram — Mon, 30 May 2011 15:40:20 +0000

I was talking about the OP and not you.

Groklaw shutting down in May

jospoortvliet — Mon, 30 May 2011 14:48:01 +0000

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...

LWN feature request:: FlorianFilter

jzbiciak — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 17:17:19 +0000

You could always print to PDF and send them that instead. Send them the link too with a proviso that it hasn't been pre-filtered, and trust them to be competent enough to sort wheat from chaff.

LWN feature request:: FlorianFilter

jzbiciak — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 17:13:14 +0000

<voiceover>Membership has its benefits.</voiceover>

Updegrove's Groklaw article

JanC_ — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 23:59:26 +0000

I think electronic communication (which might include real-time chat) over an extended period is more useful to identify somebody as "a person" than a superficial "in person" meeting with an actor or another person acting as a front for an organization...

It was fun...

anselm — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 09:18:30 +0000

That's you, opening this conversation.

Nope, that's me commenting on you commenting on Florian commenting on vonbrand, who pointed to Florian's comments. Hardly »opening this conversation«. You're also quoting me out of context.

And this is really the last you're going to hear from me in this discussion.

It was fun...

jthill — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 23:09:02 +0000

No I didn't.

Who do you think you're fooling?

it was Florian who actually went to the trouble of documenting

That's you, opening this conversation.

It was fun...

anselm — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:57:12 +0000

You're the one cited his work as evidence. You get to live with the association.

No I didn't. That was vonbrand. Go check. (Also I'm intrigued that you apparently expect me to point you to some comment of mine that PJ has canceled, as »evidence«. Duh. The whole point of PJ suppressing comments she doesn't agree with is so they're gone.)

Anyway, I'm out of this discussion. I gave up on Groklaw long ago and won't miss it at all; I don't need to waste even more of my life arguing with PJ's fan crew here on LWN.

It was fun...

jthill — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 21:12:40 +0000

kicking out people she does not agree with

Again with the gratuitous characterization, backed by nothing. Again.

Please leave Florian Mueller out of this.

You're the one cited his work as evidence. You get to live with the association.

comments on the original article

(1) that post is still there. (2) people there were treating him very gently. (3) I see him going on and on about "IBM's patent threats", as if IBM made any. They didn't, but he sure is determined to paint it that way.

If you kept on and on for days offering nothing but accusations on Groklaw as you're doing here, it's no wonder she started killfiling posts. It's just a matter of cleanliness.

It was fun...

anselm — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:17:26 +0000

IBM would have to be stark staring insane to license their OS for production use on an emulator -- particularly for use on an emulator being used as last-resort disaster backup. The sheer stupidity of what they were being asked to do is actually more ludicrous than the allegations made about their refusal to do it.

Whatever. I'm not opening that can of worms. Let me just state for the record that I believe (and have commented on LWN.net to that effect when the issue was ongoing) that as far as I am concerned IBM is perfectly free to license or not license their software to whoever they want. In my own personal opinion I don't think it would be any skin off IBM's nose for them to offer reasonably-priced no-support licenses to Hercules users (it's not as if people are queuing to replace their IBM z/OS mainframes with PCs) but that is neither here nor there.

Mueller's /. post on the subject was my first contact with his work […]

Please leave Florian Mueller out of this. My issue is with PJ's suppressing comments by and/or kicking out people she does not agree with, in general. It happened to me and various other people other than Florian Mueller. What Florian Mueller said or didn't say, on Groklaw, Slashdot, or anywhere else, is completely immaterial to the issue at hand.

Care to provide any evidence? [for Jay Maynard not »trolling« on Groklaw]

I just spent way too much time on Groklaw looking at comments on the original article dealing with the TurboHercules issue, and I have failed to see any comment of Jay Maynard's that could fairly be considered »trolling« In fact, given what various other participants in the discussion throw at him he comes across as unusually polite and level-headed (IMHO anyway). I would like to invite anybody who is interested enough in the issue to look at the same article and form their own opinion, lest I be accused of cherry-picking evidence. Ten minutes or so should be enough to get the gist of what is going on.

It was fun...

jthill — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:00:15 +0000

IBM would have to be stark staring insane to license their OS for production use on an emulator -- particularly for use on an emulator being used as last-resort disaster backup. The sheer stupidity of what they were being asked to do is actually more ludicrous than the allegations made about their refusal to do it.

Mueller's /. post on the subject was my first contact with his work. I've learned to be suspicious of claims which, if true, would be outrageous, and this one (let alone his blog post, which reeks) had the smell of propaganda about it. So I read the letters. Yup. It's the tired old propagandist's recipe for leveraging confirmation bias: manufactured outrage and vile characterizations based on some more or less subtle misrepresentation, relying on the knowledge that most people when gulled into outrage stop thinking.

And this is just more of the same.

Did these forums get drained of legal knowledge when AllParadox & Marbux left or went silent so long ago? I'm really curious here. I feel like I'm in a dream where we're taking a test and everyone but me slept through all the classes.

Yeah. That's the closing paragraph of a post anent which Mueller devotes an entire section titled 'Baseless allegations of "personal attacks".' Right. Openly presuming a roomful of people are all ignorant posers is a constructive contribution, and following it immediately with "I'm really curious here" isn't going to set off anyone's "kick me, I'm a troll" alarm.

That's so brazen it's actually funny, in a "the other possible explanations are distinctly uncharitable, so I'll regard it as a first-rate sendup of people who've never seriously faced the question, who do you think you're fooling?" kind of way.

So anyway,

What Jay Maynard did was not »trolling«

So you say. The content of his reply on "Sunday, April 11 2010 @ 01:07 EDT" does not appear in Florian's link. In fact, I don't think there's anything of his in that document. Care to provide any evidence? No explanations, no characterization, no careful framing attempts. Just facts, thanks.

Because, as it stands, what been offered so far is most succinctly epitomized as a vast disparity between your public pronouncements and the actual evidence.

It was fun...

anselm — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 06:49:28 +0000

PJ deletes such attempts on sight as the work of trolls, and all your objections amount to is "sometimes she gets it wrong". Endlessly discussing whether any such decision is wrong would also achieve what the trolls were after.

If the Groklaw definition of a troll is »somebody whose contributions PJ doesn't like«, you may even be right. However, if, for example, in the discussion of the Hercules virtual machine OS licensing/patent issue, the main developer of the actual software in question steps in and tries to present his side of what is factually being discussed, that is not what I would consider »trolling«. If anything, the Groklaw community should have been glad that Jay Maynard took time out of his undoubtedly busy schedule to contribute constructively (by correcting some apparent factual misconceptions on PJ's part) to the site. Instead he gets ejected, essentially because he disagrees with PJ on some things where to an outside observer it is painfully obvious that he is right and PJ is wrong. I wouldn't exactly describe this as »sometimes she gets it wrong«.

As far as »endless discussions« are concerned, I would much rather see a constructive discussion of the actual subject matter at hand than one about whether it was right or not to kick somebody off the site for purely personal reasons. In my opinion, the right thing for PJ to do after Jay Maynard corrected some of her factual errors would have been to apologise and thank him, then move the discussion along in the light of what she'd just learned. What Jay Maynard did was not »trolling«, and painting it as such just to bolster the notion that oh, PJ sometimes hits the wrong button, no big deal, please don't make a large issue of it since that would make PJ look bad, strikes me as disingenious. Kicking somebody off a site should be the very last thing one considers, and definitely not for constructive contributions to a factual discussion.

Updegrove's Groklaw article

paulj — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 06:29:17 +0000

I find these FM threads generally very annoying, but I have to agree with the parent: The Turbo-Hercules/IBM case sounds like a potential abuse of a monopoly in one area (copyright on critical software) to tie down another, different area (the sale of hardware, real or virtual).

A big thanks to PJ

kmself — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 06:10:18 +0000

I think early on we were all just treating this as something of interest that we felt needed to be addressed, clarified, and fact-checked.

For the Wiki, my own goals were more to create a record of the issue (one of the better pages was a timeline of events). Wikipedia does this well today, particularly with large, long news events (look to the Boxing day and recent earthquake/tsunami): stories with many facets, in which facts emerge over time, etc. I find the Wiki treatment far superior to mainstream news outlets.

Blogs are more transactional, and I suspect more immediately rewarding of participation. Wikipedia itself took a number of years to really gather mass, but once it did it was unstoppable.

My sense was that there were far more people contributing to Groklaw. I believe we had a few score users, of whom a dozen or so were highly active. Among the amusing developments was when an account appeared under the name of Rob Enderle. I followed up on that as I was concerned someone might be spoofing him, but from all appearances it was legit.

No sour grapes either way, just one of my own observations. I'm interested in what tech works and what doesn't, as well as under what circumstances.

It was fun...

jthill — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 02:34:35 +0000

Ad hominem is an attempt to reject or discredit what someone offers using something about the person offering it. An allegation may be accurate or inaccurate, flattering or insulting, relevant or pure idiotic noise. None of that will tell you whether it's ad hominem or not. My metaphor was accurate, insulting and relevant, but what makes an allegation ad hominem is the attempt to taint. If you're going to use strong language, please use it properly.

If you want to see the line between rebuke and ad hominem, step from my post to Mueller's link.

PJ deletes such attempts on sight as the work of trolls, and all your objections amount to is "sometimes she gets it wrong". Endlessly discussing whether any such decision is wrong would also achieve what the trolls were after.

So, therefore, what?

Also, please point out anyone angling to beatify PJ so we can properly mock them. She had a few years of genuine glory, not many people get that. But that's about all.

Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

DOT — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:49:01 +0000

The only relevant disclosure here is the funding question. We don't know who funds project Pamela Jones. We also don't know who funds project Florian Mueller. Hypocrisy demands that one of those criticizes the other for their secrecy, and actually supports invasion of privacy of that other. When someone doesn't want to give up her privacy, that doesn't give you the right to take it from her forcefully.

Disclosures aside, what's really important here is actual contributions. One of them publishes truths and half-truths that help the open source community a great deal. The other publishes truths and half-truths to hinder the open source community. One wonders why this piece of work won't make any friends here.

It was fun...

anselm — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:32:24 +0000

This is what in the business we call an »ad hominem« attack. What happened in the cases cited by Florian also happened to various other people, some of which have spoken up in this discussion. It does not matter that it was Florian who actually went to the trouble of documenting PJ's suppression of undesired comments (»dog poisoner« or not), and he may even have had a personal axe to grind doing so; what does matter as far as I am concerned is that the suppression occurred at all, which is nothing to do with Florian personally.

Arguing that Groklaw is PJ's blog and she gets to do what she wants on it, including arranging for tricky and unusual methods of getting rid of comments she personally does not agree with, is fine by me. It's her privilege, and so far nobody is actually forced to read (or comment on) Groklaw. However, in my opinion, this alone disqualifies her as the candidate for immediate sainthood that many people apparently perceive her to be. It may be acceptable on a blog to completely remove comments which contain offensive language, but suppressing politely-worded comments whose content one does not like, in the manner that PJ demonstrably did in various cases, is not behaviour I personally would associate with the owner and operator of an award-winning blog extolling software freedom.

It was fun...

jthill — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:31:53 +0000

Not many dog poisoners have the chutzpah to defend their act by pointing out what good steak they use to deliver the payload, and still fewer offer a blatantly poisoned steak as evidence. I suppose that could be called "courage", the quality of having one's heart in it.

It was fun...

jthill — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:48:20 +0000

Yes, I thought I remembered her describing that -- it's one of the reasons I've been hoping to stumble on that article I mentioned. It was long ago now, but as I recall it was very thorough examination of the situation as she saw it. Hers was the first description I recall of what are now called "concern trolls", for instance. What impressed me most at the time was her discussion of what she did before caging or banning people: in at least some cases, she did background investigation.

Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

FlorianMueller — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:38:36 +0000

It's unbelievable how Groklaw's desperate defenders blow things out of proportion and set up so many strawmen.

We're talking about an avatar who never published a photo, never appeared at an industry conference or awards ceremony, never disclosed a past or current employer or client. Those are the facts. You can't change those facts -- which you obviously don't like -- by making claims like the one about a driver's license.

We're far from requesting a driver's license in this case. We're talking about an avatar that hasn't disclosed any of what I listed above; as Sam Varghese explained on iTWire, Groklaw was quite obviously a full-time effort but never disclosed its funding source; articles published under the "PJ" pseudonym were, according to text analysis tools like Gender Guesser, written by at least two different persons; differences in punctuation previously suggested more than one person behind the avatar.

Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

dlang — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:34:32 +0000

if someone walked up to you and handed you a drivers license saying that they were Pamala Jones, I suspect at this point that you would suspect them of getting a fake drivers license.

Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

FlorianMueller — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:12:28 +0000

You attack a strawman with the "robot" thing. Concerning consistency of style, text analysis tools like Gender Guesser suggest that the articles published under the "PJ" pseudonym were written by at least two different persons (one male and one female).

Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

nix — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 19:09:55 +0000

All the communication I've ever had with my boss is electronic, but I don't suspect her of being a robot. All the communication I've ever had with Mark Twain is not only written but posthumous, but I don't suspect him of being fictional. It is possible to read writing for style and content and to draw conclusions about the people writing from what is written. I have difficulty believing that you don't know this.

Updegrove's Groklaw article

FlorianMueller — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:55:16 +0000

I didn't show up in that Groklaw discussion on IBM. By making this completely false claim, you just show that you're not a serious participant in such discussions, @vonbrand, but willing to say anything just to defend Groklaw.

It was fun...

FlorianMueller — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:53:46 +0000

You can find examples of polite, on-topic comments deleted by Groklaw in this PDF document on Scribd.com, which contains numerous screenshots and, toward the end, references to blog posts and forum comments in which others described similar observations.

Updegrove's Groklaw article

vonbrand — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:50:32 +0000

I came to that conclusion after looking at the evidence shown in (suprise!) Groklaw's article which so inflamed Florian Mueller. At first reading, I thought IBM was being overly heavy-handed (which wouldn't have been surpsising to me, given part history); on further analysis I came to the conclusion that they were right. And then Mr. Mueller showed up and the whole discussion went down the drain (just like here).

It was fun...

vonbrand — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:40:52 +0000

As I said, I followed Groklaw daily (at least) for years, and saw few comments deleted. And never one that "in a perfectly courteous manner, expressed opinions that went against the party line." I saw a lot of comments that went "against the party line," rarely "courteously," and said comments are presumably still to be found there. It should be easy enough to search for Florian Mueller's comments as relevant examples, there were others.

Updegrove's Groklaw article

nye — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 16:30:07 +0000

>Re the Turbo Hercules stuff: Here I do side with IBM

Would you still say that if it were anyone but Florian defending them?
I'm confused as to how so many OSS people seem to think IBM are in the right and I can only assume it's because they hate the messenger.

When Apple did more-or-less the same thing they were being Bad; when Microsoft sold copies of Windows with a EULA saying you couldn't run it virtualised they were being Evil; when IBM sell copies of their OS with a EULA saying you can't run it on anything but their own expensive hardware, suddenly that's cool?

It's a blatant abuse of a monopoly position - far worse than bundling IE or WMP with Windows or rubbish like that, but for Groklaw IBM can do no wrong, and herds of people just copy and paste their opinions from there.

It was fun...

jubal — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:21:24 +0000

Nope; the dissenting comments have been suppressed in exactly the way described (mine once was, when I pointed out, that some people aren't allowed as much liberty as the others when commenting and that comments inappropriate when addressed at PJ stopped to be so inappropriate when addressed at, let's say, Miguel de Icaza).

I wouldn't know that the comment has been disappeared if not for viewing the article without logging in. Clever indeed.

It's important to realise, that PJ is no saint, she can be indeed highly biased at times and she does have her pet peeves; most of that is visible in her comments, usually. (Bruce Byfield is quite right that the overall quality of Groklaw deteriorated after 2008.)

And it's equally important to understand, that all of the (valid) complaints are mostly of no consequence when it comes to the quality of her work (explaining legal issues, showing how the legal procedures work, etc. etc.)

And, frankly, the venerable Mr. Mueller here is much more venomous than PJ; his style is more similar to the Sam Varghese / Roy Schestowitz type of venom-spitting and hatred-inducing writings.

It was fun...

anselm — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 15:11:56 +0000

This is not what I said. Of course some comments have been removed outright due to PJ's bad-language policy. What I am talking about is comments which, in a perfectly courteous manner, expressed opinions that went against the party line and then silently disappeared from view for everyone except the original commenter (who would then have to resort to looking at the site from another computer to even find out about this).

I used to be a regular Groklaw reader for a fairly long time but mostly stopped doing so after I had this happen to a comment of mine. I'm all for rational, polite discussion and I would have been perfectly able to handle a »You're not welcome, stay away« from PJ – at least then one knows where one stands! Considering that I have lots of uses for my time other than commenting on Groklaw, PJ leading me to believe that my comments have been properly posted while in fact I'm the only person who can actually see them is (in my opinion at least) a bit unfair. I'm aware that for many people PJ essentially walks on water, but it must be said in the interest of balance that the tricky comment suppression mechanism is something which sets Groklaw off from other blogs, and which I personally would not readily associate with the idea of civil, open-minded discourse.

Groklaw shutting down in May

vonbrand — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:57:12 +0000

I apologize, I misread your name as FlorianMueller somehow.

Groklaw shutting down in May

vonbrand — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:43:08 +0000

Lucky you. Others just are more cautious, or value their privacy a lot more. Let them be, they have the same right to talk as you do.

It was fun...

vonbrand — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:33:21 +0000

You are completely mistaken. I am a subscriber of Groklaw from the very beginning. Even so I did see comments dissapear (seldom, but that could just have been timing). And the few comments I did see deleted were because of blatant transgressions to the site policy (foul language, virulent ad hominem attacks, publishing private details about people), never because of contents (and if you look over the site, you will see many opinions that differ markedly from PJ's). Yes, there have been a few "subscriber only" articles, but mainly surveys on stuff like opinions on archiving the site at the Library of Congress, asks for help with voluminous transcriptions, and other internal(ish) stuff.

It was fun...

anselm — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 14:13:30 +0000

Groklaw was a team, *her* team, and you were on it or you weren't.

Not quite. AFAIR, the way the undesired-comment suppression on Groklaw worked was that from your point of view you were »on the team« – you did get to see your own comment, after all –, but from everyone else's point of view you didn't exist at all, since your comment would be suppressed in their version of the page. Clever ;^)

The words I want to use for you...

michel — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:53:29 +0000

I fully agree. But for some reason any time I see a post now by Mr. Mueller, the Westboro Baptist Church comes to my mind. No idea why, but they are also hard to ignore. Maybe just make fun of him and continue to ask for his remunerations.

Updegrove's Groklaw article

vonbrand — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 13:00:08 +0000

I, for one (as a follower of Groklaw from the very beginning) am convinced PJ is a person (by consistency of style, opinions, and knowledge on certain issues). Does it matter? No, what mattered is that she showed the evidence, and so in several cases I came to different conclusions that the "official party line".
See the above point: An avatar (even one created by the famed HBGary) won't be as consistent as she has shown over the years. No commitee of IBM lawyers (or others) will come out as forcefully for (or against) some points as she did.

Re the Turbo Hercules stuff: Here I do side with IBM. The system is licensed to use on real, IBM machines (yes, IBM did get burned way back with the clones by Amdahl and others of their big iron running IBM software); if they opt to look the other way if somebody installs a self-compiled copy of an emulator for fooling around as an alternative to doing it on the big iron in the neighboring datacenter, that certainly is their prerogative. But they certainly will not look the other way if somebody,as part of their business operations, asks for copies of the software for running on emulated machines and leaving IBM completely out of the deal. I just don't understand how somebody even imagined that such would fly (maybe being inmersed into technical stuff can make you blind to the wider implications of what you are doing); and even less that some (clearly otherwise intelligent) people who aren't directly involved bought into this ridiculous theory.

Plus I am fogetting my guideline of not feeding trolls...

Updegrove's Groklaw article

stumbles — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:51:07 +0000

Like I have asked you before since you are the one making a big deal about it; belly up and disclose ALL your sources. Come on, be the man you say you are.

You write a lot and I can only surmise that you are being fed by unknowns in the shadows. You cannot possibly be writing that much without the help of others while maintaining the consistent bends of truth.

Right now after reading much of your bilge I am reminded of a scene in the movie Sharktail where Sykes shows Oscar just where he fits in the grand scheme of things. You are below whale poo. Unlike the movie, you will never come clean.

Updegrove's Groklaw article

FlorianMueller — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:30:39 +0000

You can't seriously think that there's any way to compare my huge degree of transperency to the intransparency of the avatar named "PJ".

Look at the wealth of information out there about me from the last 25 years and compare this to an avatar who never published a photo of "herself", never showed up at a conference or awards ceremony, never disclosed a past or current employer or client.

Updegrove's Groklaw article

stumbles — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:27:53 +0000

"The problem is, however, that if you only have "always electronic" correspondence with an online account, you can't know who's behind it, and you can't know how many people."

Just like you refusing to disclose all those who are behind/supporting you. You certainly cannot be regurgitating the voluminous of words you do without help.

LWN: Comments on "Groklaw shutting down in May"

Groklaw shutting down in May

Groklaw shutting down in May

LWN feature request:: FlorianFilter

LWN feature request:: FlorianFilter

Updegrove's Groklaw article

It was fun...

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Updegrove's Groklaw article

A big thanks to PJ

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Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

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Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

Updegrove vouches for "PJ" being a real person based ONLY on electronic correspondence

Updegrove's Groklaw article

It was fun...

Updegrove's Groklaw article

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Updegrove's Groklaw article

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Groklaw shutting down in May

Groklaw shutting down in May

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The words I want to use for you...

Updegrove's Groklaw article

Updegrove's Groklaw article

Updegrove's Groklaw article

Updegrove's Groklaw article

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