In Australia, Germany, and Poland people took action as a group in the courts and through consumer protection agencies. They shutdown SCO's FUD activities much sooner than we were able to here in the US. McBride was silenced here after his investors told him to shut up. Those Linux enthusiasts and businesses overseas didn't resort to establishing an award winning anti-FUD site or writing open letters to Darl McBride, until after the legal and political measures had been applied to the problem in the first place. Here in the US, things didn't happen that way.

If we are going to learn from our mistakes - so that we can do a better job next time - we have to discuss what went wrong and what should have been done differently. PJ conducted Groklaw's business in a compartmentalized fashion and former insiders need to be able to compare notes without being shouted down.

PJ setup her site, and then some of us prodded her into action. For example, on the 26th of August 2003 PJ wrote a single article on the old Radio blog where a Groklaw member and attorney advised folks not to worry, and to just contact their state consumer protection agencies. The same article had an excerpt of a letter forwarded to the GAO Fraudnet through Kansas Senator Brownback, and another letter to Connecticut Attorney General Blumenthal. All of that activity came to an abrupt halt when PJ was offered the use of the servers at Ibiblio.

Many of us asked (repeatedly) why that was? She responded that she didn't want Groklaw to be used to advocate political action. I do not know if this was Ibiblio or OSRM policy, but it hadn't been PJ's or Groklaw's policy up until that time. You can write checks and punch the clock at Pubpat until the day you die, or you can take political action and change the damned copyright and patent laws. I see nothing wrong with wanting to do the latter.

You might have read about Con Zymaris of Open Source Victoria in the Sydney Morning Herald, or that the government there was awaiting the results of an FTC investigation here. A group of us Groklaw users wrote a US complaint, and sent it to the Secretary of the Commission through Senator Brownback, the Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space. The Secretary of the Commission turned it over to the staff, but without any follow-up from the press here, or pressure from the public it has languished there as a routine matter of business ever since. I winnowed out some of the material and sent it to Con and he thanked me, and he forwarded it to the Victoria LUGS. PJ thinks "Pubpat represents the public's interests against wrongly issued patents and unsound patent policy," I say Senator Brownback does. He was working on our side, but PJ wouldn't publish anything about it.

He also introduced legislation to stop the RIAA from obtaining John Doe search warrants and directed the FCC to insure that any use of the so-called "broadcast flag" would preserve a consumers fair use rights, but PJ wouldn't write about those efforts either. If you think things can't change overnight, think again and remember how fast the National "Do Not Call Registry" was setup. I'm not just starting out to bitch about this sort of thing, I bitched about it in the comments I made at Groklaw.

Another point that needs to be made is that: everything doesn't need to be introduced as an article. Almost nothing could appear at Groklaw until it could be rewritten into some folksy short article full of irrelevant details about PJ's sister borrowing her clothes without permission or some such thing. I got along fine without that in my news coverage for 50 years, and could do so again with very little effort. Newspapers have classifed ads, carry legal notices, and present lots of information without trying to "sex it up". There needs to be a section where long boring documents like the Novell APA can be posted "all at once" instead of the piecemeal fashion in which it was handled by Groklaw for the first several months.

PJ was assisted by a group that presented her with tons of factual research and documents that speak for themselves. I personally received 400 e-mails from PJ over a six month period asking for answers to various technical questions. In many cases I was simply being asked to verify something another reliable expert had already told her. It made no difference when I did confirm those things, they never became the basis for any material that appeared on Groklaw. PJ was in no position to contradict or question the advice of her panels of experts, but she all too frequently did so anyway. I worked in the government telecommunications business all of my adult life, and am willing to listen to the opinions of others with similar experience on that subject. I was a program manager in one of the agencies that helped fund the contracts that sustained Berkeley's CSRG and would think that my opinion about the government's rights under those agreements wouldn't be so easy to dismiss.

I read everything at Groklaw and wrote 1200 posts there because I felt obliged to share some of the things I'd learned over the years. The signal to noise ratio was pretty miserable, but I did it anyway. In truth, Groklaw was NOT based upon some new and powerful idea, it was based upon sustained effort and hard work. During that same period members of my group sent over 1600 private e-mails back and forth with analysis and proofs so that we could avoid sifting through the comments section at Groklaw trying to find each others work. Research quotations from primary sources and legal documents don't need any public comment period anyway.

When PJ finally had to publish something about Novell's motion to dismiss she said:

The detailed arguments on why the APA and Amendment 2 don't measure up as a copyright transfer sound a lot like Harlan's comments for the last few months. It's complex, and you have to force your eyes not to glaze over, but here it is"

But she never published anything I had written to her about the APA. In December she had started releasing the missing portions that SCO had withheld and simply promised:

"When I have it all up, I'll tell you what I think it means." and "review the 1995 Asset Purchase Agreement and Amendment 2. Some of the clues are in there. It'll be fun, like a jigsaw puzzle."

I had supplied her with all of the missing portions. Only she knows why she didn't post the whole right then.  

For months Bruce Perens of OSRM and anyone else that could read the SEC filings knew, that Novell still enjoyed the royalties and beneficial ownership of UNIX. On the 8th of December I informed PJ by e-mail that Novell had finally registered the System V copyrights. I downloaded and grep'd the SCO SEC filings for the string "Novell" and told PJ that it had not been included among the risk factors - even though they had publicly contested SCO's ownership in May, and during the Ximian (August) and Suse (November) acquisition announcements. I also informed her that no System V OS software registrations were shown among Novell's asset disclosures. Worse still no version 1.0 and 1.1 manuals or software were listed among the assets at all. You can't convey ownership of something "in writing" and completely leave out all mention of it too.

That means she knew several weeks in advance of the ABI letter mass mailing that SCO did not own a clear title to UNIX. The information was undeniable and was stored in the US Copyright Office and SEC online databases. She chose to say and do nothing with that knowledge. SCO was not suing anyone over their web sites. Nonetheless if those had come under a DDOS attack, PJ would have managed at least an article or some analysis everyday. SCO was threatening to sue third parties over their UNIX copyrights, and those were finally under a real legal attack, but she said nothing at all. She just waited until SCO had filed their IP enforcement announcement with the SEC, and had mailed the thousands of ABI letters on the 22 December 2003. That was "perfect timing" according to her "potential recruit" way of thinking. But what if she had acted and had published the story everyday?  In that case SCO couldn't have made the 22 December filings without mentioning the Novell risk factors, and probably wouldn't have wasted the their time with all of those letters - like the ones sent to Daimler and Autozone.