Groklaw — Don't Go Home, Go Big 230
jfruhlinger writes "You may have caught PJ's Christmas Day post on Groklaw, expressing her anger and frustration that, after she helped save Novell's Unix patents from SCO's clutches, Novell turned around and sold many of those patents to an open source-unfriendly coalition. She's feeling at a crossroads and wondering what Groklaw should become. Brian Proffitt has a suggestion: a bigger, more community-oriented site."
Re:Patents aren't a problem any more (Score:5, Informative)
False. They're a HUGE problem for anything recent. Most of the concepts and technologies in open source span decades, including very new concepts as well as old ones that are covered (wrongly) by new, vague patents.
No, the goal with software patents is to make them a perpetual hazard. Vague, ill defined, and useless for actually implementing the concept in question but always useful for beating down on your enemies and keeping out potential competitors.
Re:A patent consortium (Score:5, Informative)
Isn't that what the OIN [openinventionnetwork.com] is for?
PJ wrote about that [groklaw.net] a few weeks ago as well.
Re:She's feeling abused? (Score:5, Informative)
Amazing discovery: PJ is actually human! Stop the presses!
Well, duh. Of course she had to have some motivation. Do you think people 100% coldly and rationally decide to dedicate so much of their time to a purpose they are completely disengaged from?
I don't really care about her motivation. She either provides a good service to the community or doesn't, regardless of whether she's doing it out of anger, love for the cause, or some robotic need to analyze things in a 100% logical manner.
She missed the point (Score:3, Informative)
"You may have caught PJ's Christmas Day post on Groklaw, expressing her anger and frustration that, after she helped save Novell's Unix patents from SCO's clutches, Novell turned around and sold many of those patents to an open source-unfriendly coalition."
PJ seems to have missed that the patents belong(ed) to Novell and they are free to do whatever they wish to do without consulting or appeasing her.
Re:She's feeling abused? (Score:4, Informative)
I have always found this a very American point of view. It always reads as if there is a big [PERIOD] behind it, meaning "to the exclusion of everything else". If that's true than it's just ridiculous. Corporations exist only to make money? If that would be true than we've gone seriously wrong somewhere in history. It should be all about *us*, people, living and breathing beings of flesh and blood. Corporations should exist for the benefit of society and society should exist for the benefit of the people that live in it. Our capitalist system might work best if corporations *focus* on making money, but definitely *not* to the exclusion of everything else. I think it's not too strange to demand that they do so within a certain moral and ethical framework, not passively following the boundries drwan by laws and regulations but actively seeking to be an asset to society and to its people.
I can almost hear you say "dream on", but I think it starts with chaning this way of thinking where nothing else is expected of a corporation than money, money and ever more money.
It's not a "way of thinking", it's a genuine structural problem with sharemarkets and corporate governance. Take Cadbury for example. The company did have motives other than profit -- it was founded with a particular emphasis on supporting its employees. Last year, Kraft wanted to buy Cadbury. The management wasn't keen on this, and fought it, until Kraft increased their offer very slightly. At this point, a problem with modern corporate governance kicked in. The chairman could not demonstrate that the share price would rise above Kraft's offer in the short term; that meant that strictly he could not recommend to shareholders that they should reject the offer -- he had to say that the offer was in shareholders' best interests. Many of the shareholders were pension funds. While some fund managers personally did not like Kraft taking Cadbury over much either, as managers in charge of other people's investments they didn't feel they could act against the recommendation of Cadbury's board, and so felt they had to accept the offer. So, even though nobody personally liked the deal, the requirements of everyone's role mean that they had to choose to approve the deal. This was compounded by a large number of funds that bought shares and immediately voted for the deal, because of their requirement to make money for their investors (in this case through the differential between the share price and the deal price).