Pamela Jones

From ArticleWorld

Pamela Jones is the founder and editor of Groklaw, a FOSS-related law website. Groklaw covers legal news that are of direct interest to the open-source/free-software community. Pamela Jones founded Groklaw benefiting from her training as a paralegal, later augmented by several people in her team. Articles signed by her have appeared in many magazines as well, including Linux Journal, LWN and Linux Today, and has co-authored "Open Sources: Voice from the Open Source Revolution", one of O'Reilly's best selling books.

Groklaw and Grokline

Pamela Jones declared that she started the Groklaw project shortly before the SCO vase was filed. She was initially motivated only by the learning experience, as one of her latter jobs could possibly involve blogging, and decided to tackle legal subjects as a law-trained reader of Slashdot who was put off by the large number of law-related comments which were "way off", as she said. Groklaw was initially only an experiment trying to apply open-source principles to research and to combat the FUD created by major commercial vendors. Groklaw became famous while covering the SCO Group's trial.

Grokline was another of Pamela Jones' projects, started in February 2004, aiming to track the Unix ownership timeline. The project reached its goals, managing to find and get permission to publish the BSDi settlement agreement which has been sealed by all parties. Publishing this BSDi agreement was a stepping stone in SCO's suite, putting off much of SCO's FUD.

Critics

Despite her role and often good decisions, Pamela Jones received an important share of criticism, not only from the commercial vendors like SCO and Microsoft, but also from the open-source community. The open-source movement was somewhat put off by Jones' implication in a research project as a member of the Open Source Risk Management team. An accusation of her involvement in OSRM's patent research was later proved to be false.

SCO Group accused her of being associated with IBM, and, during the trial, asked IBM to disclose all communication between them and Pamela Jones. However, IBM declared that there was absolutely no association between them and Jones, and nothing to disclose since IBM didn't communicate with Pamela Jones. Jones herself declined any association with IBM.

A major scandal erupted in the Linux-related press after Maureen O'Gara wrote an article that severely criticized Pamela Jones. The effect was inverse though: Maureen O'Gara's article received so much criticism even from the open-source community, that Sys-con publicly apologized and dropped O'Gara from the list of authors. LinuxWorld decided to hire O'Gara, a move that greatly irritated the LinuxWorld journalists who resigned as a protest.