Pamela Jones: A committee of one

I'm a little the worse for wear still. I don't like to be too specific, but I'm not dying. I am OK. But I've cut back some, to keep from wearing out. I hadn't taken more than two days off in 4+ years, and that was just too much. Who knew when we started that SCO would take so long to sink? And there was a lot of stress.

I certainly would take a break again if I needed to. But so far, so good. The adjustments I've made seem to be doing the trick. As long as I pace myself, it seems to be working out. Thank you for asking and for caring.

I'm just a person. Just like you. Not a superhero. Just a person. If you met me, I assure you you'd be disappointed.

I don't know how any of those guys stand it, being public figures, and I definitely don't want to live that way.

Yes, I could make money doing conferences, speeches, etc. I am not saying I'll never do it, but I really doubt it. I'm just not cut out for a public life. Some people seem to think that if you can be famous, you have to be. But I don't see why. I am putting my brain out there, my thoughts, and sharing what I know. That's enough, I think. I like to keep the rest private.

I didn't do Groklaw as a career move. I did it as a creative experiment. I had an idea and I wanted to see if it could work. I can't possibly tell you how satisfying that is, to see a dream come to life. There is no money in the world that can top it.

I feel it intensely. And I also don't worry about it at all.

The feel-it-intensely part: The first time I had an article put on Slashdot by someone, back in 2003, I went into a real panic. I asked a lawyer I know to please take over doing Groklaw. But he talked me into continuing myself.

But I feel it very much still, the responsibility. I am having fun, for sure. But I try very, very hard to be accurate and to be fair. And I listen carefully to what Groklaw members express and I try to then include that in what I write, to express what they want said.

I know that I could lose trust by stupid moves. So I'm alert and trying hard. Sometimes I think about things like that at 2 AM and I get up and check something to make sure I didn't goof.

The not-worry-at-all part: The truth is, many of my mistakes are out there already, so I'm used to it. I write for friends. In my mind, that is what I'm thinking as I write. I figure they'll give me the benefit of the doubt. Every article has a corrections thread. I don't mind making mistakes in public in that sense, and I don't mind saying I was wrong about something when I am. In fact, I feel it's a duty to do so. I believe that as long as my mistakes are honest and I'm open about them and never pretend to be anything but what and who I am, people will listen and retain their trust, despite mistakes here and there.

But any major misstep like printing a story without carefully fact checking it and getting two sources, all the usual safeguards journalists have, could undermine credibility, and that is what I've worked very hard to earn. So I am alert and doing my best, and yes, that is part of the stress of Groklaw, because the simple truth is, we're all just humans and humans make mistakes. It's what we do.

As for trolls and deliberate meanness, people trying to undermine Groklaw's reputation, at first it bothered me more than it does now. I had to develop a thicker skin or stop doing Groklaw, so I developed a thicker skin. When it first started, in late 2004, and it seemed like a deliberate smear campaign, I thought, "What kind of people are these? Why are they willing to behave so abominably, be so dishonest, deliberately try to ruin my good name?" I had never known anyone like that before in my life, and it actually kept me awake nights. Like going to a horror movie. You can't sleep for weeks. Then I stopped thinking about it. It is what it is, I decided. Maybe I never met such people before, but they were on the same planet as I was the whole time. Then I relaxed a bit. But the thought was, how far will people like this go? I can't imagine doing what they do for money. Is that not a pitiful life choice? But where is *their* line? They go way over mine already, so I thought about that quite a bit.

For about a year, I thought they would in fact succeed in destroying my reputation. The attacks were daily, all over the Internet. But I just kept on doing Groklaw, because I knew the research was good, solid, and worth putting out there. Here's what happened. The FOSS community is made up of brainiacs. That is our greatest strength as a geek community. The things that get you teased in school as kids turn out to be very useful as adults. People simply understood that it was an antiGroklaw FUD campaign. And they figured out who might be behind it. I didn't have to say or do much at all. Ironically, it ended up just making Groklaw more well-known. Funny.

It helps to have a sense of humor, speaking of funny. When I wrote once that there is no Santa Claus, a small side point in a long and very serious article about something else, trolls made a big issue about it -- it was one of our most commented articles -- and it made me laugh so hard reading their comments about how there is too a Santa Claus and how awful I was to write that there wasn't, it cured me of caring about what they said from that day on. I got it that day. They just picked on something in every article to criticize. Every single article. Anything. Santa Claus, anything. Once I saw what the game was, it just made me laugh watching them work so hard at such nonsense. And that helped to make it stop. It wasn't working, and we were just laughing. Some Groklaw members spontaneously started to mock and imitate their style. They were just so much smarter than the trolls, it was no contest. So, we made it through intact.

That's part of my makeup, happily, to laugh at funny things in life, and I get a lot of enjoyment from the comments people leave on Groklaw. But it also helped that I don't much care about praise or recognition or criticism, so when I was being defamed, it didn't throw me for a loop to the degree it might someone who cares more about such things. Not that I enjoyed it. I hated it, and it hurt me, and it offended my sense of morality and justice, but I just barreled onward anyway. I never thought, "Oh, this is so humiliating, I'll just quit and go hide under the bed."

That is probably more words than you wanted, but it was quite an experience, one I'll never forget. It is surreal to have to "prove" you are a real person and not a committee of IBM lawyers.

: )

Especially for a nobody paralegal.

I have thought of it, and I have a plan. You never know if it would work or not until you try, though. The thing is, it would be different if someone else wrote it. My style is me. I see others try to write like me sometimes, but the trick is to be yourself, not copy someone else. So someone else with their own strong style of writing would have to do the articles. Or probably several people. I had some unique situational pluses making it possible for me to do Groklaw. It's very demanding of your time. Could it be done? Sure. I am not indispensable.

On the other hand, you could live without ice cream, too. It's just that you don't *want* to.

: )

I hope.

I enjoy doing it. I wake up and I run to see what is happening.

If others want to try to do something like it, here are some things I've learned. The secret to doing something like Groklaw is to never be cruel or mean. And never to use it for propaganda. I'm quite serious. You have to respectfully listen to what everyone is saying in the legal documents, even if you think they are way off. And keep an open mind. That is the only way to evaluate properly what is happening and what a court is likely to do, to read and listen as respectfully as you can, trying to understand their point of view. After that, you can use humor to poke fun at whatever deserves it, but not in a mean way. And you have to be honest and fair. If someone you don't admire makes a valid point, you have to acknowledge it. If you research and find something that proves they are correct on some point, you have to tell. That's part of being intellectually honest.

That doesn't come up much with SCO, but in the beginning, you'll see that for quite some time, I had no idea who was right about the contract dispute. We hadn't seen the agreements. After I read them, then I could take a position, but not before. It doesn't mean I wasn't hoping SCO was wrong, but it would have been wrong to assume it.

And there are tasteful ways to handles matters you cover and to rebut the concepts and issues by providing facts, without attacking individuals. I try to stay on the ideas, the words, the strategies, not on individual traits or flaws.

I know how to be mean, but I don't want to be. I very much want to be a decent human being, and to treat every other human with the measure of respect they deserve just for being fellow human beings. I wish everyone behaved like that.

Yes, this could work for any lawsuit where people cared enough to want to help. If you are suing to enforce a one-click patent, Groklaw's readers probably won't help you. And there are some cases I don't think it would be good to do on Groklaw.

Lawyers are used to keeping things close to the vest. And in many cases, they are right to do so. Legal things can't be open in the way software code can be. SCO made this case a media event, so it was to me very appropriate to answer their public statements. But there are other cases where I wouldn't cover it on Groklaw. In fact, in the HP spying matter, I didn't cover the class action lawsuit, because it was against individuals, not just the company, and it felt gruesome to me. I just couldn't do it. I naturally care about other people's privacy, just as I am grateful when people respect mine. And when Daniel Wallace sued FSF and various companies over the GPL, I didn't cover it in the Groklaw style, because he was pro se, and it felt like shooting goldfish. But I also thought he might perfect his handiwork if I commented on his legal documents. So it was a strategic decision.

One role I see Groklaw playing going forward is to help lawyers understand the tech. This is the next plateau, in my mind, for Groklaw, and we've begun already to implement it. If a lawyer has a case and he isn't quite clear on the tech aspects of the case, I would encourage him or her to write to me and I'll arrange to ask Groklaw's readers for input. We've done it now a couple of times, with good results in one case particularly. They can stay anonymous if they want to. But there is a community of very skilled and knowledgeable people who contribute to Groklaw, and that is a resource you can tap. Like a maple syrup tree.

Readers have already helped one attorney know what tech questions to ask at a deposition, for example, by explaining the technical details of the fact pattern in his client's case. And another lawyer was writing a book and he asked for some input. And I hope we'll be useful in hunting for prior art in patent cases in the future. We've done some of that already.

Ah! Courts in the US are slow. I understand that feeling of frustration, but the actual trial in Novell begins in September. It will last several weeks. So that is your time frame. There are now summary judgment motions before the court in both the Novell and the IBM cases. And we could get decisions on those any time in Novell and who knows when in IBM. IBM has been put on hold until Novell is decided, so there is no trial date set yet. Those motions are significant, in my view, in that if SCO does not survive them and particularly if Novell wins on the issue of copyright ownership, I think the whole SCO universe goes tumbling down.

What complicates the picture is that there is arbitration going on in the Novell case also. This is happening in Europe and that goes to trial in December.

Appeals: yes. I expect appeals. There is only one path on that, to the appeals court assigned to Utah.

I think predicting court outcomes is very tricky. You can never say what will happen for sure. Only what you think *should* happen. I know it's popular to say SCO can't win, and lawyers have said publicly their case seems very weak. I think it shouldn't prevail, but I never rule it out completely. By win, it could prevail on one point and lose on others. It's way more complex than just win or lose. And judges are also human beings, who may or may not grasp all the tech. In this case, he does seem very able, but the law is like chess but with people, and people are not as predictable as rooks and pawns.

It's a funny thing. I wondered about that myself. I thought we'd probably just stop, and I'd do something else. I was fine with that. But since we began covering other topics besides SCO, our readership has grown. So I see that there is an interest in understanding all cases in the news, not just this one.

Clouds. The biggest one in my view is corporate players in the community not comprehending the importance of the GPL to the FOSS development method's success. I think that is a bigger problem than Microsoft, that and not understanding the danger of patents and patent deals to the health of the ecosystem.

The FOSS ecosystem can't be strip-mined by just one or a few players.

Well, it can be, but the result will be the ecosystem will die. That appears to be the plan coming from Microsoft, to kill off the development model as far as commercial code is concerned and make Linux a per-seat licensed and chained-up patented thing. De facto proprietary. Who wants that? It's violative of the whole point of FOSS and it degrades its value.

IBM stood up to SCO when no one else would. I will always be grateful for that. Imagine if they had not. And so far, they have tried to be true community players, not exploiters. And Sun has recently taken a public position supporting GPLv3. I follow the license. That is what I trust. I'm an end user. So I'm naturally going to choose a license that protects me as an end user.

And let's face it. It's the community you can trust, as Jeremy Allison wrote recently, more so than companies. And even there, it's more people you learn to trust, individuals, not groups or companies, but individuals who prove themselves trustworthy.

I have absolutely no idea. Well. I have two ideas I'd like to implement personally if I ever had the time:

1. I'd like to do a living history project, videotaping the elderly, or rather making it easy for them to do so themselves, letting them talk about what they know. Life lessons. Why should all that knowledge go to waste, when we have the technology for the first time in history to preserve it? They could show things too, like how to crochet or how to fix things around the house. Tell about historic events they experienced. Wouldn't that be lovely to have?

We used to have extended families, and in my case, my grandmother lived with us for years, and I loved her very much and I still benefit from things she taught me. I wrote about her once, in an article about the British Library and DRM restrictions.

I loved writing about her and I think about her a lot. I wish very much I had videos. I think of things I wish I'd asked but didn't think to ask because I was a child. Now I'd like to ask her, but she's gone. If she'd made videos, when I wanted to know the answer to a particular question, there she'd be. Multiply her by millions of people sharing what they know, and you get the idea. Isn't that a wonderful idea?

2. I'd like to build a searchable IP case database, where you can find cases, entire dockets, on cases that matter from around the courts system in the US on IP law. I am waiting to see if Google is going to do it. If not, I'd really like to begin to think about it. The US courts are all going digital, and that makes it a conceivable dream. So that is a goal of mine, to make that information more accessible.

Both ideas, and all you mention, stem from the Internet making it possible to do things from afar, in a distributed way, with people who never meet but are still able to work together no matter where they are located, based on common interests. That has indeed changed the world.

But it hasn't changed some things. People, for example. It changed who has access to a platform to speak. But people are still people. For sure, Groklaw would never have happened otherwise. No one would have given me money to set it up. Never. A nobody? No grand resume? No experience doing something like it before? A nobody paralegal? No friends in high places to pull strings? Even the idea of it would have seemed, back then, ridiculous. But I knew I could do it and that it could work, once people started to show up. I just knew. I knew we could do it because I could see it in my mind. There were variables, but I knew if they played out right, we had the skills. I just knew how it would be. Bob Dylan spoke about that feeling once in an interview, and he said he felt that in the beginning. He just knew what he could do. And he said, don't tell people you know you can do something, because they'll try to kill your dream.

The Internet means there's no one to kill your dream. You can just do it. You don't have to persuade anyone or get credentialed or even think about what others think of your idea.

One correction. I don't think Wikipedia is FOSS-like, although I'd phrase it more that it's not Open Source-like. It isn't either, because it lacks the most important piece: someone to make final decisions who knows how. The Linus and lieutenants roles, if you will.

Someone has to have the vision, the skills, and the ability to take a project in the right direction. Input from everyone -- with a low barrier to entry or no barrier -- is the key to success, yes; but there has to be a viable filtering system, not based on a democratic vote, so good contributions get used and bad ones get excised. Skill and expertise aren't necessarily equally distributed. It doesn't mean you need a resume, but you have to be able to do what needs doing. And someone has to have an idea of what the project should accomplish and how to get there, where it should be headed.

Otherwise, to me, it's not following the Linux kernel model, anyway. That model is based on distributed trust and individuals given more authority when they prove they know what they are doing, not on just anyone making a contribution equally or at random. The contribution has to work and it has to withstand critical testing. And Linus gets final say.

It's an important distinction. So with Groklaw. It's not a free for all. I think Wikipedia will in the end see the need to do something like that.