There's nothing journalists like better than a good old fashioned catfight. (The animated gif catfight is from Supah.Com. I guess you can send it to friends as a postcard.)
And in tech journalism today it doesn't get any better than Pamela Jones vs. Maureen O'Gara.
Jones edits Groklaw, the free community blog which has covered the open source revolution's legal defense so expertly. Her stuff is so good that SCO talked about putting together a rival site, called Prosco.Net, last year. (As of this writing that site is still empty.) Jones is so ethical she actually quit a really good job to stay on the beat, writing "money is nice, but integrity is everything." (I think I'm in love.)
O'Gara edits the $195/year LinuxGram newsletter. She writes fast, tight, "insider-type" stuff, with tabloid headlines like "Ray Noorda's Competence in Question." She learned her trade at CMP, and calls her company G2 Computer Intelligence.
Conflict was natural because of their differing styles. Jones is careful and shy to the point of near-invisibility. She writes like a lawyer. O'Gara is brassy and bold and uses the rest of the press as her PR machine. She writes like a journalist.
What got the feud rolling was a stunt O'Gara pulled before the court in the case of SCO vs. IBM. She filed her own motion to unseal the records, then did a story on her heroic act.
Newspaper companies do this all the time. They fight to unseal records of criminal trials or government decisions, writing a series of stories on the filings and the reaction. But Jones didn't like O'Gara's headline, nor the attitude in her story which was (to say the least) self-congratulatory.
Jones let O'Gara have it.
No hostility there. Maybe a little around the edges, oozing out? Leapin' Lizards, Batman, the heroine action figure who apparently wishes to Take the Open Source Movement Down singlehandedly is none other than Maureen O'Gara, who is asking the Utah court to unseal all the sealed records:
But life really got interesting last month when O'Gara wrote that the Linux kernel was about to be rewritten to protect it from copyright claims.
It was a great story. Trouble is, it wasn't true. And Jones told her readers all about it in a piece titled "No Virginia, Actually There Is No Santa Claus."
I know many of you have read the latest article by Maureen O'Gara about a purportedly impending announcement on January 25th that IBM, Intel and OSDL, with the city of Beaverton were working together to create a consortium to rewrite Linux to remove all code that supposedly infringes Microsoft's patents. You didn't read about it here, you'll note. That's because I didn't believe it was an accurate account. For one thing, I was fairly confident that if something like that were going to be announced on January 25, I'd probably know about it before Maureen O'Gara.
It is, as they say, on.
Personally I think both sides bring something to the party. Pamela Jones believes in the adversarial system of the legal process. Maureen O'Gara believes in the adversarial system of the journalistic process.
The problem is that in covering this like a sporting event, O'Gara makes it appear both sides have equal merit, and equal weight should be given to their statements. She's letting herself be used by SCO to "sell newspapers," as they say, just as newspapers and TV reporters have let lawyers string them on for ages.
And that gets under Pamela Jones' skin.
Does it get under yours?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Lou on February 24, 2005 08:32 AM writes...
Thanks for this piece. As a regular reader of Groklaw I just assumed O'Gara was getting compensated by SCO and writing to assist their nefarious cause. Instead of being for SCO, she's just like SCO, which is "self-serving." The prevailing sentiment of the Linux and FOSS movement is about serving everyone, literally changing and improving the world with a smattering of C code. O'Gara and SCO and their ilk are exactly opposite, and it hurts to see them use FOSS this way. It would be like selling unlicensed Mother Teresa t-shirts, then suing someone else who steals the unlicensed image. Maybe not the best analogy, but there it is.
Anyway, good writing, and best regards.
Permalink to Comment2. _Arthur on March 4, 2005 11:46 AM writes...
"O'Gara makes it appear both sides have equal merit, and equal weight should be given to their statements."
I disagree, O'Gara is blatantly prejudiced in favor of SCO, in it shows in each and every of her articles.
She recently called SCO's upcoming financial restatement a "non-issue".
Permalink to Comment3. Tom on March 8, 2005 01:55 AM writes...
She is also in first row asking SCO-supportive questions at SCO's teleconferences.
Permalink to CommentPersonally, I hope she sinks with her frineds at SCO.
What I can't understand, though, is what she would hope to gain from this association. Becoming M$'s paid apologist...??
4. Reagan on March 20, 2005 06:43 PM writes...
Is this the same Maureen who during SCO conference calls, congratulates them on their progress and then proceeds to ask fluffy cream puff questions? Yeah, some journalist.
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