Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog

When I got up this morning, the news was all over Facebook and the free software news sites: Groklaw, the site that was influential in the SCO legal cases, will stop publication on May 16. It's news that I hear with decidedly mixed feelings.

Pamela Jones, the site's owner and chief writer, announced the decision in a post on April 9. "The reason is this: the crisis SCO initiated over Linux is over, and Linux won," Jones writes, although the last acts in the long drama are still being dragged out. "I kept going all these years because when SCO attacked in the media and in the courtrooms, there was nobody to do what we did. Only the community could have answered SCO, technically, because you guys lived the history of UNIX and Linux and you knew what they were saying was not true. So we spoke up and explained over and over until everyone understood."

Jones did not give many details about the personal reasons for the decision, except to say that, "I have some other things I want to get back to and a project I've wanted to get to for a long time, and I want to be able to wake up and not worry about what happened in the news." In addition, Jones says that, "The events recently in Japan deeply affected me, and it reminded me that there are some other things I'd like to accomplish."

Groklaw in its heyday

My first reaction is that an era has ended. I started reading Groklaw when I was in a consulting position with a company quickly headed for oblivion, and there were times that reading or hearing the latest on Groklaw was one of ways I kept my sanity. It was also part of my geek cred with developers that I understood the issues that Groklaw discussed. More importantly, Groklaw proved to my satisfaction that a non-developer could make a contribution to free software, giving me an example that eventually caused me to become a journalist.

In its heyday, Groklaw's influence and importance were unmistakable. Looking in one direction, it provided a clearing house for information that eventually helped to dismiss SCO's nuisance suits. No one had ever used the development techniques favored by free software so devastatingly in a legal case. Groklaw, more than any other project I can think of, proved once and for all that crowd-sourcing could be a valuable tool.

Just as importantly, Groklaw educated its readers in some of the realities of law, telling them when a procedural decision by a judge or a motion by a lawyer might be reason for concern, and when such things were simply part of the legal routine. At other times, Groklaw led its readers line by line through convoluted legal documents, explaining them with an attention to detail that few could match.

In its heyday (which I would put roughly between 2003 and 2008), no site could touch Groklaw in these areas. Groklaw fully deserved the Free Software Foundation's Free Software Award that it won in 2008, because it was doing things that no one else was doing, and doing them supremely well.

The latter years

Yet, for all my original admiration, I admit that I had stopped reading Groklaw with any regularity in the last couple of years. It seemed to have passed its most effective years, and its weak points were becoming more prominent as it floundered for copy outside coverage of the SCO case.

Groklaw's strength was always in aiding and explaining legal matters. Elsewhere, especially in business, the inexperience showed -- all the more because of the obvious expertise in the law. At its worst, Groklaw's writers seemed to have no idea how decisions were made in business, and often resorted to interpretations that came close to conspiracy theory.

In its later years, Groklaw too often seemed to fall prey to over-determinism. By that I mean that, given its mission to seek out and expose or debunks threats to free software, it increasingly tended to see threats everywhere. As a result, while I rarely found anything to disagree with in Groklaw's basic positions, increasingly, I found its conclusions questionable, or at least unproven -- and a sad decline from the quality of its analysis in the early days.

Among its readers, this tendency to naive paranoia became exaggerated, so that the comments became less and less worth reading. Probably, too, Groklaw inspired (with what degree of deliberateness, if any, I have no idea) sites like Boycott Novell (now TechRights), which mimicked the tone of Groklaw while drawing no distinction between the articles which were based in expertise and those based on naive speculation.

Often, this decline was accompanied by an increasingly prolix style. I found it increasingly hard to read the articles, and often could only struggle through to the end by doing the mental exercise of editing them to make them more effective. Perhaps those running the site have been growing restless for some time, or perhaps the knowledge of a loyal following encouraged less care? Or perhaps, in expanding into discussions of more diffuse issues than the SCO case, the writers became less focused and careful themselves. But whatever the reason, for the last couple of years, Groklaw seemed less effective than it had once been.

An example worth remembering

I do not make these comments in any spirit of ill-will or jealousy. Unlike one commenter on LWN, I see no reason to doubt that Pamela Jones exists, or is being reclusive for any reason besides a wish for privacy. Nor do I care if she is using an assumed name, or happens to be male.

Still, I do think that now is the time for Groklaw to quit. It is not ending at the height of its influence, but it is ending before it slides into complete irrelevance. That seems only sensible, especially if Jones' interests have shifted. Advocacy is a demanding job, and I can imagine nothing worse than continuing it when your heart is not completely in it.

Besides, I have never believed that a eulogy should be uncritical. If you have loved someone or admired something, you should remember the good with the bad. In Groklaw's case, that seems especially important, because I suspect that the strength of its legal analysis and its occasional wrong-headedness in other matters came from the same depths of emotion. Although I admire the first and regret the second, I suspect that we could not have had one without the other.

However, one way or the other, I will miss Groklaw. Nor, despite my misgivings, will I forget its basic lesson -- that individuals can make a difference, especially when they get together.

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