ChangeLog: Groklaw is hosted by an IBM-supported Web site — and this means absolutely nothing

A story at InformationWeek.com today noted that (gasp) notoriously anti-SCO Web site Groklaw is hosted at ibiblio.org, which is partially sponsored by IBM. This obviously means IBM is supporting Groklaw. Except for one thing: ibiblio.org hosts a wide variety of sites, including The Poetry Project. And Videobloggers.org. And North American Slave Narratives.I’m looking at the ibiblio.org main page. Right up top, in the masthead, it says, “the public’s library and digital archive.”

A library can and should host all kinds of material. For instance, ibiblio has downloadable binaries of Caldera Linux in its collection. Since Caldera is what SCO used to be called, does this mean (gasp) that IBM is sponsoring SCO?

I suppose I could write an inflammatory headline that said so, although I’d rather write one about how IBM “sponsors” the ibiblio-hosted Tibetan Center for Conflict Resolution, a group whose services SCO CEO Darl McBride could certainly use.

One could also point out that IBM is not the sole sponsor of ibiblio. The ibiblio about page points out that ibiblio was founded by the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill’s MetaLab, formerly known as SunSITE, and the Center for the Public Domain in September of 2000, well prior to the SCO suit against IBM. In addition to IBM, ibiblio also lists VA Software, OSTG’s parent company, as a partner.