About a month ago I wrote this note making the case that perspective was in short supply. In that piece, I lamented the fact that a few chuckleheads from the Linux crowd took it upon themselves to contact Yankee’s Laura DiDio at night, and at home – thereby giving the innocent 99.9% of the open source advocates a bad name. Well, I’m sad to say that we’ve got another incident, only this time it’s the pro-SCO crowd embarrassing themselves.
As you can find out from this /. thread, Maureen O’Gara (author of the false “IBM rewriting the Linux kernel” story, among other things) wrote an article that detailed the purported home addresses of Groklaw’s PJ and a family member, PJ’s home phone number and claims of her religious affiliation, etc.
I don’t really care what the specifics are beyond that; O’Gara was unforgiveably wrong for doing that, and it’s absolutely inconceivable to me how such an article somehow made it through the editorial process (the article has since been taken down). But the damage is done, and that’s what’s sad about this. The loss of privacy, like the loss of identity, cannot be repaired with a simple, “Sorry, won’t happen again.” Once the damage is done, it can’t be undone. One would hope that this is the end of the affair, but it might not be.
I’m not defending her because I know PJ personally (I don’t), or even because I’m particularly enthralled with Groklaw. While I think the site does an outstanding job with its factual reporting and deconstructing of court documents and such, and has had an absolutely undeniable impact on the SCO litigation, it’s also home to some fairly biased and non-fact based commentary and criticism which, in my view, impacts its credibility. With a few exceptions, I stopped recommending it as a resource quite a while ago.
But whatever my feelings – or yours – on PJ or Groklaw personally, there is simply no excuse for this sort of invasion of privacy or ad hominem attack. None. Unfortunately, the SCO mess seems to bring out the worst in people, with the exception of the outpouring of support PJ’s receiving in mulitple forums right now.
So let me just add my voice to the chorus: I might not agree with you all the time PJ, and I might not always agree with Groklaw, but I am truly sorry for what happened to you.
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