Salon.com has an article this morning about the controversial SCO v. Linux battles (Making The World Safe For Free Software). It's mostly an overview piece of the history behind the conflict, but it also includes a nice little analysis of how Groklaw, the legal blog dedicated to chronicling the fight, has provided a sort of "open source" approach to researching many of the legal and factual issues in the case, relying on its thousands of readers to examine the allegedly infringing code and perhaps saving defendants like IBM hundreds of thousands of dollars they would have otherwise spent on legal or consulting fees...
Well, if you were a lawyer at one of those Linux-leaning corporations, one thing you might consider doing first is reading Groklaw. Groklaw was founded about a year ago by Pamela Jones, a paralegal and a techie who became intrigued by SCO's $5 billion case against IBM. SCO claimed that IBM engineers had secretly stolen code from SCO's Unix software and stuffed the code into Linux, making Linux an illegal copy of SCO's property. Jones, who was skeptical of this claim, began blogging about it. "I thought maybe, in my wildest scenario, a hundred people would ever read what I was doing, and I was thinking exclusively of a blog, not a Web site," Jones told Salon in an e-mail interview. "Blogs are more casual and have more leeway editorially. So I was just breezing along with panache, without a care in the world. It felt like I was writing 'Dear Diary, today SCO did thus and so.'" But as the SCO case heated up, Jones saw her site catapulted into the spotlight -- i.e., it was getting frequent links from Slashdot -- and the content morphed into something more than breezy blogging. Soon, she says, groups of people with expertise in various areas of the law and software development began offering her tips, and in a short time these readers began working together on Groklaw projects aimed at undoing SCO's case.
For example, in January, a group of Groklaw regulars published an exhaustive examination of a set of files in Unix System V called the Application Binary Interface; the team looked at the legal and technical history of these files, as well as SCO's role in their development, in order to determine whether SCO could reasonably sue others for using the ABI files. Their conclusion: "I think you will see from this article alone that if SCO is planning to sue anyone over the ABI files, unless there are facts we haven't unearthed, they seem to be leaning on a rickety bamboo reed."
"I couldn't do that definitive research without the community," says Pamela Jones. "I don't think IBM could either, for that matter. I believe we have established that there is no point in SCO pursuing the ABI files."
Jones has been praised by just about everyone in the open-source world for her efforts to undermine SCO. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, has said that Groklaw shows "how the open-source ideals end up working in the legal arena, too, and I think that has been very useful and made a few people sit up and notice." Bruce Perens calls Jones "paralegal to the world." Clay Shirky, the influential tech pundit, points out that "Groklaw may also be affecting the case in the courts, by helping IBM with a distributed discovery effort that they, IBM, could never accomplish on their own, no matter how many lawyers they throw at it."
Reminds me a bit of how OpenLaw worked for the Eldred case...
Category: IP Use
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Copyfight comments a Salon.com article about the SCO's case and
[Read More]Tracked on April 15, 2004 01:40 PM