A Discussion of SCO's Fate With Groklaw's Pamela Jones 84
An anonymous reader writes "The SCO Group's current fate can be neatly summarized by the title of Pamela Jones' very first article on the case, back in May 2003 — 'SCO Falls Downstairs, Hitting its Head on Every Step.' In the intervening years PJ and Groklaw can be credited with unearthing and exposing many of the flaws in SCO's case, most notably, obtaining and publishing the 1994 settlement in the USL vs BSDi case. An article at the ITPro site interviews PJ about SCO, the impact of Groklaw and future of free software and the law."
An educated public (Score:5, Insightful)
Grass roots (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone forgot to mention: hero (Score:5, Insightful)
Three Cheers to a friend of the open source community, diligent, tenacious, and gleeful in that determination.
Integrity counts. Pamela Jones is a champion of the OSS community and the values it stands for.
PJ...does...not...exist (Score:2, Insightful)
every time an occasion comes up when she might HAVE to make an appearance she suddenly "gets sick" and disappears (like when SCO threatened to subpoeana her [forbes.com], and even when she won the Knowledge Masters Award for Innovation [groklaw.net] and had to accept it in absentia because she "got royally ill").
even the authors of her wikipedia page are debating [wikipedia.org] whether she should be treated as a real person.
That's one theory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Mostly, though, I'm surprised to see SCO employees posting on Slashdot- you'd think they'd be too busy looking for new jobs to troll here. Of course, if they are still 'working' for SCO, they might as well be browsing Slashdot during the day...
Something has to be done to fix the system (Score:5, Insightful)
We badly need to fix the system where incompetent shysters like him can't even get into that position, let alone be personally rewarded for catastrophic failure.
I mean, what on earth were the SCO board thinking when they agreed his last performance bonus?
Re:PJ's status in the Corporate world (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:An educated public (Score:2, Insightful)
How? The public had about zero effect on the SCO/Novell case.
Re:Give her credit (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:An educated public (Score:5, Insightful)
How has scox failed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Darl is making $34K a month, which is not bad for a small-time Utah scammer.
Msft got 4.5 years of premium Linux FUD, for about $50 million - hardly pocket change for msft.
BSF pocketed, at least, $50 million.
Riamondi sold his shares in the high teens.
None of the guilty have been punished in any way, and they are not likely to ever be punished.
IBM has probably spent about between 50 and 100 million defending itself against the bogus lawsuit.
Msft has sent this stern warning: "if you want to contribute to Linux, you better be ready to spend tens of millions in lawyer fees, and spend the next five years in court." Can you say "chilling effect?"
People like PJ feel that they need to cheerlead. But, if you objectively examine the facts, I think you will find that in most respects, scox has already won.
Yes, give her credit ... (Score:3, Insightful)
- actual knowledge of what she is writing about (legal proceedings) and the self-restraint to stay inside her area of expertise (Groklaw is something that professional lawyers read to obtain information. Can you imagine *any* lawyer reading Slashdot for information? I cannot.)
- a willingness to actually do research, read source material instead of press releases, and to piece various tidbits of information together in an open and documented way (compare that to the mainstream press who can't seem to do anything but print press-releases)
- a deep commitment to and interest in discovering the truth
- a refusal to be intimidated by legal bluster
- old-fashioned correctness in speech and demeanor
For displaying these qualities in public, over a period of years, I feel she deserves a medal.
Re:That's one theory... (Score:1, Insightful)
Because you can get all the restraining orders in the world and all the video footage of thefts and all the lazy prosecutors and police will say is to move. If you don't want to move or can't afford it, they'd rather have you show up in a bodybag at which point the problem goes away for them.
It's sad that the victims, and not the thugs, are always the ones required to move.
I can easily imagine. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can. Easily. B-)
Seriously, though. I can also imagine a GOOD lawyer reading Slashdot - for leads, ideas, arguments, legal theories, and inspiration (just for starters). But then he'd CHECK them - with dependable source and reference documents, credible witnesses, traceable, certified experts, etc.
Slashdot is a rumor mill. Sometimes it's mostly mist and mirrors. But often where there's smoke there's fire.
Well ... I still cannot. (Score:3, Insightful)
- Slashdot if far too diffuse: it doesn't focus on any single topic and covers that really well. In the words of Cmdr Taco it tries to present an appealing mix of stories. There you go ... you cannot ever *count* on Slashdot covering anything well. It does however focus on IT-oriented stories.
- Slashdot itself possesses zero editorial expertise. The expertise (if any) is all with the people who post here. Posts vary from garbage to insightful and you can't tell which is which without actually reading them all (despite the moderation system).
- Slashdot posts usually carry a substantial bias and are almost always strongly opinionated. No lawyer can afford getting caught up in that for any professional research. He might use it to get a quick sample of opinions though.
- Because Slashdot's valuable insights are so diffuse, trying to get at them is like mining gold from seawater. There's an awful lot of gold in the oceans but it really isn't worth your time to try and extract that. The gold content in IT-related topics might just be high enough to take a look at, as opposed to any business related or legal topics.
- A lawyer might just let a paralegal sift out the more obvious rubbish before taking a look at it, but then only when he already knows that Slashdot actually has something on the subject he wants to know about. And he generally wouldn't know that from visiting Slashdot, but from a search engine like Google.