By Dan Goodin in San Francisco for The
Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
Since splashing into the blogosphere in 2003, the author has
written some 3,000 articles, the vast majority of which portray SCO
as an opportunistic parasite in the guts of an otherwise thriving
open-source organism. Her tireless unearthing of legal flaws and
lapses of reasoning in SCO court documents has brought a smile to
many Linux geeks' lips.
But it's also led to accusations that the author is, in fact, a
paid agent of IBM pulling off one of the most successful astroturfing campaigns in recent memory. Those
theories recently gained a new lease on life.
First, SCO lawyers trying to serve Jones with a subpoena were
unable to locate her at a home in Darien, Conn. where she was
believed to live. Suspicions were further aroused on Saturday, when
the author announced she'd be taking a hiatus for an undetermined
amount of time while she recuperated from an illness.
Following Forbes publishing the details of the latest hunt, the
Linux faithful wasted no time unleashing their indignation. Of
course Jones was a real person. She answered her own email. She
blogged about the evils of patents. She held Sony's feet to the
fire when it slipped a root-kit-laced mickey onto some of its CDs.
Surely, no one carrying IBM's water would do such things.
But that hasn't stopped the theorists from continuing to
question the true identity of the Groklaw blogger. Among them is
Maureen O'Gara, a dogged reporter who in 2005 set out to meet the
blogger at her Hartsdale, N.Y. residence but came away
empty-handed. What she was able to piece together, she said in an
interview, was a 61-year-old woman who lived in a run-down
apartment and kept Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlets in the back of her
car – not exactly the portrait conjured up by her relentless
scrutiny of SCO.
"She sprang fully formed from the brow of Zeus like Athena,"
O'Gara said of Jones when asked what first piqued her suspicions.
"She comes with a fully formed open-source philosophy and a mission
to try a case before it's even been heard, and there's nothing
balanced in her."
When O'Gara published her findings, along with Jones's address
and other personal details, all hell broke loose.
Sys-Con, which owned one of the sites carrying the
story, was DDoSed back to the Stone Age. The management took down
the offending story, and over time, the rest of O'Gara's work.
We emailed Jones, asking for comment, but haven't received a
reply. Which pretty much leaves the sequel as unresolved as the
original story.
© The Register
2007
