Enterprise software vendor SCO Group plans to launch a website to chronicle its legal battles relating to Unix and Linux, as part of an effort to counterbalance Groklaw.net which was set up to poke holes in the company’s legal claims, a CNET News report says.
The site, to be called Prosco.net and launching on 1 November, will feature an archive of legal filings, hearing dates and SCO positions on various matters.
SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said, “The site will be designed to be informational for people desiring to follow the company’s litigation. We’ve received a lot of feedback from people saying, ‘I would like to follow what’s going on, but I would prefer to not have to visit Groklaw.'”
Groklaw provides legal filings and detailed analyses of SCO’s legal cases with IBM, Novell, AutoZone, DaimlerChrysler and Red Hat. It’s popular with open-source fans who generally disparage SCO’s legal attack.
The interesting thing is that Groklaw is a blog, and a highly-active one at that (one post yesterday afternoon already shows over 400 comments) with a clear goal to enabling easy information sharing: in addition to commenting, it has RSS webfeeds. It’s run by journalist Pamela Jones and many contributors as an amateur project.
Will SCO’s new legal site also be a blog? The CNET News report doesn’t say, but it look likely it won’t be as the report quotes SCO spokesman Stowell as saying that, unlike Groklaw, SCO won’t let others post their opinions on its site.
What a missed opportunity! If people want an alternative information resource to Groklaw, as SCO says, developing a web offering with all the attributes of a blog would enable SCO to really engage with its audiences via this medium. Or is that what SCO is afraid of?
The usual static corporate website, no matter how well designed and user-friendly (take a look at SCO’s), is very unlikely to help SCO achieve its communication objectives in the face of Groklaw’s web offering, which reflects the new way of using the web effectively.
Static, no; two-way interactive, yes.
CNET News | SCO to launch legal Web site
Also, see detailed commentary on Groklaw.net about SCO’s website plans: “SCO Is Chafing Badly Under the Propaganda War It Is Losing to Groklaw”