I have a suggestion for Google. Why not a Google Legal? Would it not be wonderful to have legal documents readily available and organized in one place for the general public?

I have a suggestion for PJ:

I have a suggestion for Groklaw. Why not a Google Groklaw? Would it not be wonderful to have legal documents readily available and organized in one place for the general public?

I can state that in my opinion, both Len Newman and Bruce Perens are sincere when they say that the work product at Grokline will not be commercially exploited by OSRM--though, certainly the facts contained in that work product can be exploited commercially be anyone because facts are not copyrightable.  I can also state that they have been very open to my criticisms and have clearly been interested in dialog.

I can also state, though, that during our conversations the copyright notice on Grokline changed to indicate that the copyright belonged to OSRM.  This is a conscious and intentional decision, as I understand it, in part in response to some of my questions.  The idea being that if there is a clear copyright holder than the transferring of the entire work to a non-profit would be much cleaner--and Len has assured me that such a transfer is something OSRM is considering.

I do have to reiterate that the tone of conversation has been very open and I get the impression that at least some of my questions have raised issues they had not before considered.  Many of those issues were not originally my idea and came from discussions here an on Yahoo CKX board.

I submit this piece of satire in light of a comment in the article A Brief History of GrokWar.  And yes, I am the original author.

Who exactly is this stranger in a strange land, PJ of Groklaw?  And why has she so recently been elevated to superstar status amongst the open source crowd?  With the recent launch of the grokline, some Bad Penguins had some nagging questions.  Who is PJ?  Why have we not heard of her before the SCO lawsuit?  Why are there no pictures of her?  Why has nobody in the community actually met her, and lived to tell about it?  What happened to the people who submit critical thoughts of her on groklaw and disappeared afterwords?

In particular, I was replying to the following three paragraphs of the article:

"And now a personal word. To all of you who attacked OSRM, and me because of OSRM, who knew about the Microsoft maneuvers and tried to creatively block them, now you know the rest of the story. I didn't write about it before, mainly because I wanted to understand the issue first personally, something I highly recommend. I didn't work on the patent project, so I needed time to study the issue before I could write about it. And then Munich happened. And then I totally got it. Think about Munich. If there were an OSRM offering patent insurance in Germany, or several such, already in place, would they have felt they needed to shut down the Linux program while their lawyers investigate the patent threat or would they have had another option? Are you so naive you don't know Microsoft already knows about any patents it can try to use as a weapon?

If you have a better plan, come forward with it now. But there is no ignoring the patent issue. It's there, not because our side wants it to be, but because the intellectual property legal system is broken. It doesn't suit software. And we believe those with an agenda are heading our way. Or they were. What IBM, OSDL, Red Hat and OSRM have done has shifted the balance. I'm also ashamed of some of you. Next time, I suggest you get all the facts before you speak. And not from Forbes and trolls. Does Forbes ever get one thing right when it comes to Linux? How do some of you forget that each time and take their poison pen seriously?

There were harbingers, forerunners of the coming storm before most of us took notice. Whispers of deletion of otherwise innocuous discussions of policy. Entreaties for equity unheeded. Dark hints of commercial conflicts of interest unanswered.

We are discussing GrokLaw, of course, http://www.groklaw.net. Last year SCO began its attack upon Linux, suing IBM and maligning Linux for "millions of lines" of stolen code. As SCO began a PR attack in earnest the early defenses were scattered and disparate.

But paralegal, Pamela Jones (PJ), had her blog and she was a fan of Linux. She wrote her opinions of the legal implications of the claims SCO was making, and the techie community not knowing and understanding law took notice. It grew and became a rallying point. The Linux techies added their expertise and other legally trained people occasionally added their voice. It grew. The wider media needed expertise in both the technical and legal questions to understand the issues and stakes; at GrokLaw both were available in one convenient place. Soon the trade magazines and mass media were lauding it. By late 2003 GrokLaw as unquestionably the most significant voice and widest used clearing house for information for vindicating Linux against the claims SCOX was making.