Eight years ago, SCO, a long-time x86 Unix company, which had recently been bought out by Caldera, a leading Linux business of the day, shocked the IT world by suing IBM for stealing Unix code placing it in Linux. A Linux company suing Linux’s leading enterprise partner!? While SCO/Caldera did have reason to be annoyed at IBM for how they had handled Project Monterrey, an effort to bring IBM’s AIX Unix to the x86 processor, SCO’s Linux lawsuit made no sense–except as an attack by anti-Linux enemies using SCO as a puppet. I, and others, said the lawsuit was nonsense, but at the time .many people still assumed that where there was smoke, there must be fire. Enter Pamela Jones, a Linux-loving paralegal who hated what SCO was trying to do, and so she started to methodically poke holes in SCO’s claims in a legal analysis blog she called Groklaw.
For the next eight long years, Pamela “PJ” Jones used her legal research skills, and the help of numerous others, day by day and claim by claim, to show just how baseless SCO’s claims against IBM, and later Novel, were. She also helped show how Microsoft financed SCO’s seemingly endless lawsuits.
During those years, she was frequently attacked by people who claimed she was an agent for IBM. Her privacy was attacked by so-called journalists. Others claimed, and still claim to this day, that there is no PJ. That’s utter nonsense.