A credit to her profession

The next time someone claims the superiority of reporters ethics over those of bloggers, tell them the story of Pamela Jones

Jones, a paralegal by training, runs the popular Groklaw blog. The legal fight swirling around open source is at the heart of her beat.

She is a reporter, and quite a good one. But she need not follow journalistic canons of ethics. As owner of her own site, she is in essence a publisher. Thus the ethics she pursues should be those of the marketplace, and marketplace ethics are, shall we say, open to interpretation.

Groklaw isnt even how she makes her living. Until recently Jones worked at Open Source Risk Management, whose aim is, as its home page proclaims, "Preserving the Benefits of Open Source & Protecting Users Against Risk."

Then the folks at SCO Unix, which is trying to scare people out of using Open Source, claiming it owns enforceable copyrights against key Linux code, decided to name her in their ongoing "road show," which hit England last week. Shes working for a company that aims to "protect users against risk" in using open source, the company said. Obviously that means there are risks.

So Pamela Jones quit her job.

As she wrote on her blog, "If my working for OSRM is doing harm by creating FUD possibilities, I need to remove that issue. Money is nice, but integrity is everything."

Can I have that last made into a t-shirt?