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Groklaw was a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003, by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.
Jones described Groklaw as "a place where lawyers and geeks could explain things to each other and work together, so they'd understand each other's work better". Harald Welte and Groklaw announced as winners of the FSF's annual free software awards
Its name derives from "grok", roughly meaning "to understand completely", which had previously entered geek slang.
Other topics covered included software patents, DMCA, the actions of the RIAA against alleged illegal file sharers, and actions against free and open software such as Android and Linux.
The first article, titled "The Grokster Decision – Ode To Thomas Jefferson", was about the effect of P2P on the music industry, and the then-recent judgement in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. by Judge Steven Wilson in favor of the defendants. The article also covered the previous Napster decision, and why it was different, causing Napster to be shut down. The article included a quotation from Thomas Jefferson and references to David Boies, who was Napster's attorney.
The second post, on May 17, 2003, also covered legal issues – the SCO v. IBM lawsuit – titled "SCO Falls Downstairs, Hitting its Head on Every Step". It criticized Caldera Systems for the way they were handling the suit outside of court, and quoted Bruce Perens, Richard Stallman, Steve Ballmer, and Linus Torvalds. It ended:
The blog soon became popular with the free software and open source communities and others, and attracted a community of volunteers and commenters. Its popularity caused it to outgrow Radio Userland, and on November 22, 2003, the standalone Groklaw website, hosted by ibiblio and using Geeklog software, was up and running.
The site became a community effort. While Jones understood law, she was not a programmer. Many readers were techies, however, and when technical issues arose they provided relevant comments. This enabled Groklaw to solicit guest commentary on issues such as:
Each of these issues appeared to have some application to the SCO v. IBM case, and most were revisited many times. Additional topics included later lawsuits by The SCO Group against Daimler Chrysler, AutoZone, and Novell, the countersuit by Red Hat, and their implications and Microsoft's attempt to fast-track OOXML as an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard., February 27, 2008 @
While articles meticulously followed SCO's litigation activities, they were accompanied by reader-submitted comments that were "overwhelmingly pro-Linux and anti-SCO."
Despite the high regard of Jones's journalist peers and the Linux community (or, possibly, in part because of it), a number of prominent attacks against Groklaw and Jones occurred. These attacks were documented and addressed in detail on Groklaw and other web sites, and also in court as part of the SCO litigation .
For the first two years of Groklaw, Jones worked anonymously, signing her articles only as "PJ". During the first week of May 2005, Linux World published an exposé by Maureen O'Gara claiming to unmask Jones. Two weeks before O'Gara's publication, SCO Group CEO Darl McBride said that SCO was investigating Jones's identity. The article included alleged, but unverified, personal information about Jones, Interview with Fuat Kircaali, CEO of Sys-Con , Free Software Magazine. , Groklaw. including a photo of Jones's supposed house and purported addresses and telephone numbers for Jones and her mother. After a flood of complaints to the publisher, lobbying of the site's advertisers, and claims of a denial-of-service attack launched against the Sys-Con domain, On Sys-Con and LinuxWorld.Com DoS (Again) , Blog Home For Steve Suehring, 2005-05-14. Tragic End to Jones-O'Gara Feud See also Kircaali interview., a sidebar to Lyons' "Attack of the Blogs" in the same issue. Linux Business News' publisher Sys-Con issued a public apology, To Our Valued Readers, Linux Business News, posted 13 May 2005 (archived 16 May 2005 at the Internet Archive; message appears near top in box with a light yellow background) and said they dropped O'Gara and her LinuxGram column. Despite this assertion, O'Gara remained with Sys-Con; as of 2009, she is the Virtualization News Desk editor at Sys-Con Media, who describe her as "one of the most respected technology reporters in the business" and has her work published in multiple magazines owned by Sys-Con Media.
McBride and Blake Stowell, corporate communications director at SCO, also denigrated Jones and claimed that she worked for IBM.. Face to Face: McBride outlines SCO's lawsuit strategy , zdnet.com. Writing Linux History: Groklaw's Role in the SCO Controversy , linuxinsider.com. Jones denied this allegation, Letter to the Editor: No IBM-Groklaw connection, zdnews.com. , Groklaw. as did IBM in a court filing. During an SCO conference call on April 13, 2005, McBride said, "The reality is the web site is full of misinformation, including the people who are actually running it" when talking about Groklaw, adding also "What I would say is that it is not what it is purported to be". Later developments in the court cases showed that McBride's statements to the press regarding the SCO litigation had limited credibility; very few such statements were ever substantiated and most were shown to be false. For example, McBride claimed that SCO owned the copyrights to UNIX, and SCO filed suit to try to enforce these claims. The outcome went against McBride's claims. The jury found that SCO had not purchased these copyrights. SCO appealed this ruling and lost. McBride also made a claim to the press that there was a "mountain of code" misappropriated to create Linux. When SCO finally presented their evidence of infringement, which centered on nine lines of error name and number similarities in the file errno.h, Judge Wells famously said "Is this all you've got?" Professor Randall Davis of MIT later made a convincing demonstration that no elements of UNIX which might be copyright-protectable were present in the Linux source code.
The Linux documentation project Grokdoc wiki was started in 2004 with the stated goal "to create a useful manual on basic tasks that new users will find simple and clear and easy to follow." Grokdoc Main Page
Groklaw extensively covered patent problems with software and hardware and the use of the DMCA against free software ideals, Open standards, digital rights management, GPLv3, and published The Daemon, the GNU & the Penguin,Peter H. Salus, The Daemon, the GNU & The Penguin (Reed Media Services, September 1, 2008; ) a series of articles by Peter Salus covering the history of Unix, Linux and the GNU project.
It covered the Oracle v. Google lawsuit in which Oracle alleged that Google's Android platform infringed copyrights and patents related to Java.
In April 2010, Groklaw was selected by the Library of Congress for its web archival project, in the category of Legal Blogs. Groklaw article
On April 9, 2011, Jones announced that Groklaw would stop publishing new articles on May 16, 2011, its 8th anniversary, as it had accomplished its original mission of revealing the truth behind the SCO lawsuits.
On May 16, 2011, Jones reaffirmed her desire to step down from writing daily articles and announced that the new editor would be Mark Webbink.
Subsequent to this decision, new patent and copyright based attacks on the Android operating system led to Jones resuming an editorial role, and along with Mark Webbink she moderated and edited the site.
On August 20, 2013, a final article appeared on Groklaw, explaining that due to pervasive government monitoring of the Internet, there could no longer be an expectation of the sort of privacy online that was necessary to collaborate on sensitive topics. Citing the closure of Lavabit earlier that month, Jones wrote "I can't do Groklaw without your input.... and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate." and "What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7... I hope that makes it clear why I can't continue. There is now no shield from forced exposure."
During 2020, the site was intermittently unavailable. , the home page and parts of the content were still available. As of October 2024, although the domain name is still registered, the landing page displayed a GoDaddy domain-parking page. On 18 July 2025, the groklaw.net site was available and mostly worked with a few odd mis-links. As of 18 August 2025 the domain name points to a crypto gambling site.
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