Practical Technology

CEO Darl McBride said that his company’s primary attorneys, Boies, Schiller & Flexner, are indeed trying to serve a subpoena for a deposition on Pamela Jones, the editor of, Groklaw, the legal IT news site.

McBride said that the idea for serving Jones came from the law-firm. “It’s my understanding that she has some material of importance to our slander of title case with Novell. I don’t know the exact details.”

This case sprang from Novell’s contention that it, and not SCO, owns Unix’s IP (intellectual property) rights. Novell claims that neither the APA (asset purchase agreement) of Sept. 19, 1995, which transferred Unix and UnixWare to Santa Cruz Operations, nor Amendment 2 to the APA gave SCO any copyrights to Unix. If Novell wins this point in Federal Court, then SCO’s case against IBM for placing Unix IP code into Linux falls apart like a house of cards with the bottom card knocked out.

SCO responded to Novell’s attack with a “slander of title” suit. SCO can’t simply claim that Novell is in breech of contract. That’s because today’s SCO isn’t the same company that bought Unix from Novell in the APA (asset purchase agreement).

To put it in layman’s terms, SCO is claiming that it should have gotten the IP rights — the title, as it were — to the Unix car, but SCO tacitly admits that it has never gotten the “ownership on paper” or “instrument of conveyance.” Therefore, SCO wants the court to order Novell to give it the title, the ownership of Unix’s IP rights.

McBride was not able to say what information Jones might have about the slander of title case. Jones has always posted all of her SCO case materials to her Groklaw site.

McBride remains not entirely convinced that Jones is a real person. He asked several times about the author’s meetings with her, and whether he believed that this person was indeed Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw.

He went on to say that he hopes that the process servers will soon be able to serve the subpoena on Jones. He added, “We’ve subpoenaed hundreds of people for our cases. This is just another one.”

McBride concluded, “Pamela, if you read this, please, give me a call. We just want to chat.”

A version of this story was first published in Linux-Watch.

According to Forbes, SCO recently tried to subpoena Pamela “PJ” Jones, editor of the popular Groklaw legal news website. They were not successful. I’ve been unable to confirm with SCO that they indeed attempted to have Jones file a deposition for one of their Linux-related lawsuits. Since this incident was reported to have happened, Ms. Jones announced on Groklaw that she has “been sick more than once recently. I don’t seem to be getting back on my feet the way I’d normally expect, and so after some thought I’ve decided to take a little break from doing Groklaw, just until I get my strength back.”

Since then, Groklaw has been kept updated by the site’s webmaster, Peter Roozemaal, aka MathFox. Jones, herself, has been quiet.

As a result of all this, there are once more rumors flying about that “Pamela Jones” is not a real person. Or, as SCO CEO Darl McBride once put it, Jones is a front for anti-SCO parties, such as IBM, and she’s not who she says she is — a paralegal who’s also a journalist.

Let me address this directly. Yes, Pamela Jones is a real person. I’ve met her several times, and I’ve often “talked” with her on email and IM. I consider her a friend.

She is not a front for anyone. She is a paralegal, hence her excellent legal research skills, which are the foundation of her stories. And, she’s a journalist by any standard I know of.

What I find surprising, frankly, is that Jones has been able to keep up her production at as high a level as she has over the years. She has been driven by her passion for open source and fairness to produce a remarkable body of work.

Let me add that while I can sing her praises, we don’t always agree. I take it a far kinder view, for example, of Novell’s relationship with Microsoft than she does.

I also have an entirely different slant toward the public knowing about me. If you want to know more about me, it’s pretty darn easy to find out anything you might want to know. Jones, however is a highly private — even shy — person in her personal life.

She also was hoping that by being semi-anonymous “people could assume whatever they wanted and just focus on what I said, rather than on who was saying it. For that reason, I chose PJ, because it could be anyone, either sex, any nationality, anyone and no one in particular.”

Regardless of PJ’s exact identity — no, she’s never shown me her passport — here’s what’s really important. Jones has made her reputation as a top legal IT reporter from her work detailing the defects with SCO’s case against IBM and Linux. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that her work has contributed enormously to everyone’s coverage of SCO’s cases.

Speaking as a writer who can argue that he’s covered The SCO Group, and its predecessor companies Caldera and The Santa Cruz Operation, more closely than anyone else, save one, in journalism over the years, I have to take my hat off to Pamela Jones. I’ve written hundreds of stories about SCO; she’s written thousands.

Groklaw, as the SCO lawsuits wind their way to what appears to their final ending, under Jones’s direction, has also been expanding its legal IT coverage to DRM (Digital Rights Management), Microsoft’s legal battles, and open document standards.

The SCO cases will go away. SCO may go away. But, once Jones has her health back, Groklaw will continue.

A version of this story was first published in Linux-Watch.