Who else misses groklaw, BTW? That was my favorite tech law site for many years.
[1] http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2003101616...
[1] http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2003101616...
But that attitude quickly changed as it became the go-to resource. As one internal lawyer said to me at the time "it's nice to be on the good side for a change!" (somewhat tongue in cheek, but the broad community support was, I would safely say, unlike anything they were used to!).
(I worked for the LTC at the time, but never had any direct involvement in the case).
Basically she had privacy concerns. As I recall, at least one journalist had tried to track her down in real life.
I personally know an analyst who was convinced it was a sock puppet site for one of the litigants. I don't think he was ever convinced otherwise even though a journalist friend of mine, who I absolutely trust, assured me it was a real person who was about as you would imagine.
So, yeah, I believe PJ was more or less who she appeared to be. I'd also expect people would be very skeptical about such a blogger's identity under different circumstances.
But yes, SCO really was moving against her in the background, so she had some reason to be paranoid there.
But, yes, in general there were fellow travelers with various camps behind the scenes and money flowed in deniable ways.
I suspect it was a pseudonym given her concern about privacy and that being a common name, although not obviously such.
The community could, and did, call her on it when they believed she was making motivated arguments during the TurboHeracles affair. This to my mind shows that it was really a community and not just an echo chamber.
The ones that stick in my mind were a guy called Florian Mueller who seemed unreasonably determined that Linux was ‘stolen’ and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution which put out papers claiming that Linux could not have been written by Linus as operating systems are just too complex, and must have been borrowed from Minix.
Both appear to have had significant Microsoft backing.
ADDED: In other words, Greg always most objected to the lack of citation more than anything else--which is very important in an academic context.
He was flat out wrong and he put his efforts into spreading FUD about it while taking money from Microsoft, all while the SCO stuff was going on.
It’s very hard to see his efforts as anything other than paid-for propaganda.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...
Institution --> Institute, IIRC?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville_Instit...
Then the TurboHercules thing started and her position on that didn't sit well with some in the open source community since they weren't exactly real threats to open source and the shadowbans started, etc.
Then she left the final goodbye note which is still up: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
[0] http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20130818120421175
But speaking as an outsider, something changed and it became a bit of a torches and pitchforks site. When there was a post that was basically saying “you’re either with us or you’re against us”, I had to quit.
I thought PJ did a huge service to the community in the earlier days of Groklaw, it is certainly a part of the lore of Linux and the internet as a whole. Sad that it took such a toll on her.
Judging from your comment it seems like there's a real need for tech law site.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/157-weekly-review-of-high-profi...