Q&A: Pamela Jones of Groklaw

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We've seen Groklaw described as a "hack on the law", or more accurately, as "open source" applied to the law. Is that a fair reflection of the community that has grown up around Groklaw and the way it works? What have your helpers, friends, and contributors (the community) given to the cause?

It's accurate that it's open source applied to legal research. Actually, it's a hack on open source. You can't work on open legal research in quite the same way you can develop software, so I had to adapt. Not everything can be open, because you have to consider factors that are not in the mix in software development. I don't publish people's home addresses, for example, just out of human kindness, the Golden Rule, if you will. And there are certain types of cases I would never cover.

There has been some outrageous press coverage of Groklaw over the last few years, including personal attacks, and some more recent less than fulsome apologies for getting the facts so wrong. In the light of this, do you have any reflections on the nature of the press, 'think tanks', and consultancies in the technology industries and how they influence the technological climate?

How much corruption there is in the media/analyst world. It's part of why, though, many people now view blogs as more reliable sources of information than the mainstream press. Sad, really, because you need both, and analysts can be very helpful when they are honest and competent, and many are. There is, in the US anyway, a trend to attack people, not ideas, to try to defeat an idea by smearing someone who holds an idea you don't like. I don't see the logic there, but that's probably my geek side. Because I never responded in kind, people were able in the long view to sort out what was going on.

Technology seems to be beset with legal entanglements. Interoperability seems permanently hampered by issues of intellectual property, and as the use of free software in the developing world grows, the contradictions between the interests of the incumbent and emergent powers in this field seems to grow. If you could change a part of the law as it effects free software, what would it be?

I think software and patents need to get a divorce. They hold back innovation and hence they damage the public and do the exact opposite of what patents are supposed to be for. If you absolutely must have patents on software, then at least enforce the law that says that if you get a patent, you have to disclose fully. At the moment, there really is absolutely no way for a developer to know if what he is developing is or isn't violating someone's patent, no matter how hard he tries. So it's a trap. Any time someone wants to create trouble for you or kill you off as competition, they can. That isn't what patents are supposed to be for. Proprietary vendors may assert that they can't disclose, because then their software will be revealed. OK. But then you should rely on trade secret protection instead, not patents, because the whole point of patents was to induce inventors to reveal their inventions, so others could build on them.

What do you think the big issues of the next few years will be, affecting free software and its growth?

I see big money interests short-sightedly making moves that in my view will destroy the GPL and the FOSS development method if they succeed. They want to do to Linux what they did to Unix, only worse. I doubt they fully realise it, since their focus is on making money. But they are, in my view, killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

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