Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethbro | Hacker News Reader

Were you on Slashdot when SCO was ongoing? If not, this is what a corporate titan proxy war looks like in the news cycle.

And it's objectively defensible. The outcome of this lawsuit will shape what an incredibly important future technology looks like and who controls it.

View on HN

Man, I miss Groklaw. I would love to have a Groklaw-equivalent following this trial. I wonder if folks could, like, crowdsource a salary for PJ to cover a new trial?

I'd stopped reading by then, but apparently she stopped posting in 2013 after Lavabit.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175

"[...] So. There we are. The foundation of Groklaw is over. I can't do Groklaw without your input. I was never exaggerating about that when we won awards. It really was a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.

I'm really sorry that it's so. I loved doing Groklaw, and I believe we really made a significant contribution. But even that turns out to be less than we thought, or less than I hoped for, anyway. My hope was always to show you that there is beauty and safety in the rule of law, that civilization actually depends on it. How quaint.

[...]

My personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible. I'm just an ordinary person. But I really know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through, that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find myself unable to write. I've always been a private person. That's why I never wanted to be a celebrity and why I fought hard to maintain both my privacy and yours."

And I can't imagine that Snowden or the other NSA leaks have made her feel safer about being a public figure.

It seems quaint now, reading her expectations and worries, but it's honestly infuriating that in less than a decade we've gone from an expectation of net privacy to haggard indifference at government's best efforts to engineer electronic panopticon.

> It seems quaint now, reading her expectations and worries, but it's honestly infuriating that in less than a decade we've gone from an expectation of net privacy to haggard indifference at government's best efforts to engineer electronic panopticon.

Lots of cheerleaders for that right here. It's a sad state of affairs, to put it mildly.

Yeah, I get that reading most of the stories feels like rehashed gossip rags. But it's the meta that's cool to me; this is a real life battle of technology behemoths with hefty repercussions, and the media is part of the game. It's cool to watch it play out.

I wasted so many working hours over SCO. Tons of arguments at work and reading slashdot. Oh man those were the days. :)

I am no where near as passionate about uber vs google probably because google vs uber is not as great as microsoft vs linux and the survival of opensource.

SCO?

You're in for a treat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO/Linux_controversies

I remember showing up to their local meeting with some other Linux guys in the area and politely calling bullshit on their lawsuit. It was kind of fun, although I'm not normally one to court controversy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Operation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO/Linux_controversies

v IBM. Aka, the case through which pj taught most of the tech community about law.

http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2003101616...

IBM gave a good lesson too, their response was a work of art.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com