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Corporate legal attacks on free software have increased in recent years as open source code works its way into mainstream consumer and enterprise markets and more media attention is placed on intellectual property rights. The highest-visibility case of this kind involves The SCO Group, a small, Utah-based Unix products and services company which filed a landmark $5 billion breach-of-contract lawsuit involving Unix and Linux code in March 2003 against IBM. Millions of words have been written about this case, many of those on this site; in fact, entire Web sites have been created around this and subsequent SCO Group litigation. The case is scheduled to go to court sometime in 2005.

Software IP lawsuits have involved most major IT companies, including AT&T, Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and many others. (A good reference site for computer and Internet law is Megalaw.com, run by a San Diego, Calif.-based group of lawyers.)

More recently, the Mambo free software content management system came under attack from a former public relations representative named Brian Connolly, who runs a company called Furthermore. He insisted, despite convincing evidence to the contrary, that some of his self-described "proprietary" HTML was illegally contributed to the PHP-based Mambo, and proceeded to threaten and harass people connected with the project via email and on public message forums. As he received more attention in the press and in the forums, he grew bolder and more defiant.

Regular blog, mailing list, and message forum contributors will recognize this kind of behavior as trolling. The recommended course of action, according to common Internet wisdom, is to ignore the troll or -- if he or she is persistent -- to forcibly and permanently remove him or her from the community. "Feeding" the troll -- arguing with him, in other words -- only makes it worse. Those who attack publicly without the requisite evidence to support their claims could also classify as a kook, according to the Jargon File.

Regardless of labels, there was an obvious problem at hand, and it was not dealt with properly. What warning signs were there that this situation would get worse without strong and decisive action? What could have been done to prevent it in the first place?

The perfect troll

What separated Connolly from the average troll was his carefully crafted argument that Mambo contained his copyrighted code and his underlying plan to profit by the situation. But he would not identify the exact code -- only the particular functionality that it provided. He also refused to produce any official or legal documents that would suggest his claims were true. So his accusations of code theft and copyright infringement -- terms that Connolly did not appear to truly understand on the several occasions we spoke with him -- were made into a big mystery. No one could definitively deny Connolly's claims, because there were no details to dispute. In effect, Connolly employed an elaborate and intelligently designed smoke-and-mirrors argument to generate attention.

Connolly's argument was circular and therefore could stand longer than a more logical argument with the same amount of evidence. But what kept the issue alive was the threatened consequence of non-compliance: suing project members or end-users who have downloaded and installed the Mambo software. Most people can't afford to be involved in a lawsuit, so this threat is a terrifying prospect to those who downloaded and are using Mambo in good faith. Connolly's trap was perfectly composed to force people into submission. If he truly believed that his business was injured, his only beef should have been with the programmer that he says contributed the allegedly proprietary code to Mambo.

A long and inglorious history

On the surface, Connolly appeared to be in a position of power. His demands included such things as copyright attribution in the Mambo source code and on the front page component of every Mambo site, and exclusive proprietary rights to Mambo's code base. Mambo is, however, licensed under the GNU General Public License, and therefore can never have restrictions added to its license terms. What Connolly was asking for was both ludicrous and impossible to obtain. He told us that these demands were a "starting point" for some kind of negotiation that he assumed would take place, but there could not have even been a reasonable compromise because of the complete lack of evidence.

Connolly gave out his real name and contact information, and that's all that is required to do a little research to see if he has a past history of similar incidents. The people he has threatened would be better prepared to handle a future Connolly complaint if they know what he's done to others in the past. Using only Google and a request for tips on a public Mambo forum, NewsForge was able to collect numerous examples of Connolly's past online exploits. Indeed, it was not the first time that he had joined a public forum and proceeded to troll it.

Connolly has left a long and embarrassing trail of newsgroup, forum, and email messages that exhibit a certain pattern of behavior that in some ways remains consistent, and in others appears to be escalating. The latest of his messages deals with the Mambo project and are the most strange and vulgar of all his public campaigns. His tactics started out as blunderbuss attacks but have slowly been refined over time.

To help Mambo users better defend themselves against FUD and legal threats, we offer this examination of Connolly's exploits. Here are just a few links:

Using the email address clast@interaccess.com, Connolly began posting messages to the chi.media Google Group, a newsgroup for members of the Chicago radio and television media, sometime in 1997. Messages were alternately signed as "Abbie" (no record of Abigail Baffing shows up on the White Pages or through Google; this may have been some kind of alias or alter-ego that Connolly created) and "Brian Connolly;" after October 14, 2001 "Abbie" stopped posting to the group, but Brian pressed on.

Although not a member of the media, Connolly trolled the newsgroups with odd, often offensive messages that garnered quite a number of negative comments. At one point his attacks seemed to be directed at a local CBS newscaster, an apparent attempt to indirectly attack an ex-girlfriend, according to a post by syndicated radio host and author Chris Witting. Two regular members expressed their concern with Connolly's mental health, saying his message was "like the post of a stalker."

With prior knowledge of these posts, the best course of action for the mamboserver.com and mambers.com forums would have been to ban Brian Connolly and possibly a range of IP addresses associated with him in order to cease his attacks. Most ISPs also prohibit this kind of behavior, and it would have been worth reporting him to his online service provider's abuse department. But there are more than just a few Google newsgroup postings. Even if the forums had put an end to his trolling, Connolly had other weapons of mass distortion in his arsenal.

A license to kill the competition

The second wave of Connolly's offensive was in the online media, and when the stories dealing with the Mambo dispute went to press, Connolly was able to again publicly voice his tales of code theft and misappropriation of his supposedly proprietary code into the Mambo core. In our followup to the original story, we showed that the code in question -- the "lead story block" functionality -- is nothing but a couple of trivial and common HTML table attributes which are widely used in content management systems for the same purpose. Not only that, but the code that Mambo uses to accomplish this function is about as different as it could possibly be from the code that Connolly claims ownership of. So it would seem that, licensing and distribution issues aside (yet equally detrimental to his argument), Connolly has no reason to be upset with Mambo end users and developers.

One would wonder, then, why his newest offensive against a free software project continues. To figure that out, we hit the Web again and found some interesting Connolly nonsense such as this message, where it's said that Connolly has gone on similar "crusades" in the past. These "crusades" against Connolly's various former employers are oddly reminiscent of the one that he wages against Mambo, except this time he seems to have become more aggressive and vulgar.

Amid many similar messages, Connolly posted the following threat to the mamboserver.com forums on Aug. 30, 2004: "Those of you who make a living with Mambo, send your prospects a link to this thread. Now imagine this thread times 500 all over the world. Okay? Maybe perhaps that's incentive to deal with this matter reasonably. Or not. I don't care."

And then this: "Again, I imagine these types of conversations repeated in 500 (more) forums all over the planet. That my friend would be the end of the project."

And in an email to several members of the Mambo community on Sept. 5, 2004, Connolly wrote: "As to timing, I think I told you Arnes, Rob Enderle's article on this comes out next week; that was my first reason to hold on the release of the Media Advisory (I promised to give him the scoop). Also, I want to coordinate the timing with my friend John Weathersby Chairman of Open Source Software Institute. He has agreed to mediate in the best interest of the OS Community. BUT... if that fails (which with Castley is likely) the media alert will be distributed directly to http://www.marketwire.com/mw/distribution_product_summary?racode=iw085. We've also identified 25 tech editor/writers who are predisposed to this issue. We've also targeted the major industry forums and maillists."

The common theme here is that Connolly was threatening to take his story to the press if a "resolution" was not reached by a certain date. Details of his conditions for resolution were not disclosed until much later, and then only in emails to individual people. Connolly acquired a list of media contacts from Blake Stowell of The SCO Group, and according to his public messages, he intended to ruin the Mambo project by creating an array of negative press stories with his new contacts. Connolly also told NewsForge and several other sources time and time again that "no business will touch Mambo" while it is involved in a legal dispute like the one he has started. This suggests that the primary target of his attacks may be his competitors -- companies that also sell customizations to the Mambo CMS. If Connolly were successful in his media campaign, other businesses like his would keep away from Mambo, and if his lawsuit threats amounted to wins in court, no other companies would even be able to use Mambo. All this would leave Connolly as the only person who could use, license, and distribute the popular and powerful Mambo CMS.

More public-forum shenanigans

The May Report has a few gems from and about Brian Connolly, including this interesting quote from Ron May on 9/27/2004, which supports Connolly's anti-Mambo media efforts. May and Connolly are apparently friends, according to the above-linked May Report message, and May was reluctant to support any of the anonymous negative comments about Connolly. May said at the end of his message, "if you cross [Brian Connolly]... watch out."

Searching the forums at ePrairie will also turn up some of Brian Connolly's "self-styled crusades" against former employer Ruder Finn, a public relations agency.

A list of Connolly's posts on a GNU mailing list can be found here; he was banned for trolling, after having been a subscriber for only a short while. One list member observed that Brian Connolly doesn't understand free software.

We stopped looking after we found these posts; presumably there are more, but Connolly's public behavior was clear enough from these that we did not believe it necessary to search further.

More on page 2: the battle gets personal

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