Tue 27 Mar 2007
Info Week slams IBM for sponsoring Groklaw
Posted by Greg under General, Litigation
Infomation Week has an article this week claiming, among other things, that IBM provides sponsorship for the the nonprofit that freely hosts Groklaw, a fine legal repository famous for its anti SCO slant.
Per the article:
Groklaw, a widely read Web site that has sided with IBM in its legal battle with The SCO Group, receives free hosting from an academic research project that is in part funded by IBM, according to the project’s director.
Paul Jones, director of the University of North Carolina’s ibiblio project, confirmed in an interview that ibiblio provides free Web hosting services to Groklaw and that ibiblio is funded in part by grants from IBM as well as several other tech companies with a strong interest in the promotion of the Linux operating system.
“We have some sponsorship from IBM, although they’re not our largest sponsor,” said Jones.
Jones said he was unable to say exactly how much funding ibiblio receives from IBM. Inquiries to IBM on the matter weren’t immediately answered.
Groklaw for years has been a thorn in the side of The SCO Group, which sued IBM in 2003 claiming that IBM’s contributions to the Linux operating system contain computer code purloined from SCO. Since then, Groklaw has become an online repository of case documents and fierce anti-SCO editorializing by the site’s editors — including chief blogger Pamela Jones, who is not related to Paul Jones.
IBM gave a swift and concise response, saying essentially “you people are smoking crack”.
Tags:No TagsIBM has no connection to the editorial content posted on Groklaw.
Groklaw’s website, and hundreds of others, are hosted on a website at the University of North Carolina (UNC), called ibliblio. This site is described by UNC as a public library. ibiblio runs on IBM System x servers which were funded through an IBM Shared University Award Grant awarded to UNC — a grant that predates Groklaw ever being hosted on ibiblio. Anyone can host a site there and IBM does not sponsor, nor endorse, the content of those sites.
IBM is proud to sponsor many universities around the world in various ways, including helping them host websites like the one at UNC.
March 29th, 2007 at 6:03 am
- industry rags such as infoweek, eweek, and others have deteriorated over the last five years… they’re thinner, less full of advertising, and vacillate between slamming and praising open source depending on advertising dollars and changes in editorial management…
- half the articles are vacuous trolls, and the editorial rants don’t make sense half the time…
- the bought-and-paid-for cabal of tech journalism is really no better than main-stream media siblings - incompetent, burned-out hacks who like to deem themselves ‘journalists,’ but are in reality nothing more than wannabe slackers…
- there was a time when the predecessors of these rags provided well-researched, accurate, and insightful commentary, but that hasn’t been true since the mid- to late-80s…
April 10th, 2007 at 3:37 pm
In an update to this, it turns out that SCO uses the same service, donated IBM hardware, as an FTP server for downloading their files.