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A Brief History of GrokWar
By ColonelZen, Section grok*/OSRM Articles
A Brief History of GrokWar
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.
But GrokLaw was not the only voice. The Yahoo SCOX financial board had an established community of recognised posters also critical of SCOX. This was to become the battleground for GrokWar.
The early indicators were posts about capricious comment deletion policies on GL. Questions about the ethical conundrum of PJ's employ by OSRM, a business which stands to profit by greater fear of the legal liabilities of Linux. There were allegations of misappropriated credit where work done by some people and posted on their own sites would appear on GrokLaw with no attribution other than "a volunteer". And the "blind deletion" problem, where a post on GrokLaw which was marked for deletion could not be seen as deleted by the poster, was troubling as well. The storm broke in early October of 2004. Andy, aka w4rmc47, had written a tool and site, yahoeuvre which indexed the SCOX posts in various ways and allowed them to be summarized and re-presented in a variety of useful ways. He wanted to extend that to GrokLaw and its comments and wrote PJ for some information on doing so. PJ flat out told him no. After some back and forth and waiting more than a day for a last reply Andy, apparently wishing to know what was wrong, asked the question on the SCOX board excerpting some of his email with PJ. That Sunday night (October 10) Andy's posts led to a long discussion. For many or most it was a largely intellectual exercise. Until that time the notice on each GrokLaw page had said that the site was licensed under the Creative Commons (v2) License though it added that each contributor owned his own works. It seemed to many participants that there should be absolutely no legal bar to indexing GrokLaw by any site which abided by the terms of the CCL; PJ's refusal did not appear to have a basis in the licensing terms of her site. Late that evening the notice on GrokLaw pages was changed to "GrokLaw (c) Copyright 2003, 2004 Pamela Jones". Many in the SCOX community were disheartened and disturbed by the change but almost universally acknowledged her right to do so. There was no subsequent doubt that an index after the license change would be a copyright infringement. Still it might have been seen as no more than an autumn rain, misunderstandings and personality conflicts, but ... A few days later in comments on GrokLaw PJ referred to that discussion as "an astroturfing production". The next day in another comment after referring to the discussion, in the next paragraph with no segue she commented that Darl McBride had said that he had wanted his people to post on GrokLaw. Additional comments by PJ and her supporters referring to the SCOX posters as "yahoos", shills and astroturfers were legion. The SCOX community who participated in that discussion, including many long established and respected members clearly antagonistic to SCO's claims against Linux, were deeply embittered. They had long regarded the somewhat overlapping GrokLaw community as "fellow travelers" and felt betrayed. For several weeks sniping back and forth continued. On the SCOX board tensions ran high as there were many regulars who felt greater loyalty to one side or the other. At the end of October one of the most respected members of both communities, John Gabriel, announced that his account on GrokLaw had been deleted with little in the way of explanation. The storm of comments partially fractured the SCOX community, some members taking their "off topic" comments to a little used financial board CKX. To many what was worse than John's deletion of account from GrokLaw is the highlighting of a problem with the software on GrokLaw where all of John's previous comments have lost attribution; they are now attributed on GrokLaw to "anonymous". John has asked that either attribution be returned for his comments or, in accordance with GrokLaw's stated comments policy, they be deleted. GrokLaw has not complied. This is unfair at best; it may also have legal implicatons though John has stated that he does not intend legal action. Following John's announcement and illumination of the consequences many other members of GrokLaw have asked that accounts be removed in protest and some demanded that their contributions remain attributed or deleted. The legal ramifications of prior account deletion with subsequent disattribution of comments do not appear to have as yet been addressed at GrokLaw. Now it appears there are new sites springing up to expand upon the work GrokLaw has done while hoping to avoid its problems and conflicts. Only time will tell how successful they will be. -- TWZ 2004-11-04
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A Brief History of GrokWar | 311 comments (307 topical, 4 editorial, 7 hidden)
A Brief History of GrokWar | 311 comments (307 topical, 4 editorial, 7 hidden)
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