Groklaw to cease publishing new articles

Groklaw, the paralegal blog which followed the SCO vs Linux lawsuits in detail over many years, is to stop publishing new articles from 16 May. In a posting on the site, paralegal Pamela Jones, also known as PJ, said that the main reason was "Linux won" and "SCO as we knew it is no more". The halt on 16 May will be exactly eight years from the opening of the site in 2003.

Although Jones believes that "the same people that propped SCO up are still going to try to destroy Linux" she says that the battlefield has moved and Groklaw is not needed the way it previously was. Jones says that she has other other tasks she wishes to return to and a project she wants to start on. "While it's been a thrill and deeply satisifying", she says that Groklaw also was "all-consuming of my time and skills and energy."

Over the years, the site has won many awards including the Free Software Foundations Award for Projects of Social Benefit in 2008 and a Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award in 2010. In April 2010, the site was selected for archival by the US Library of Congress as part of its web archival project. Beyond the SCO vs. Linux case, Groklaw has covered subjects such as the standardisation of Microsoft's Office Open XML, the EU anti-trust cases against Microsoft, software patents, the effects of the DMCA

The current plan for Groklaw is to cease publishing new articles on the site. Existing content such as the timelines will be kept up to date and the ongoing project to transcribe the exhibits from the Comes vs Microsoft case will be completed "if it kills me" says Jones who closed the posting with the summary "In short, we dood it, y'all."

(djwm)