SCO Hits Iceberg in IBM Case

With over two-thirds of its Linux claims dismissed out of hand, SCO's case against IBM looks worse than ever.

On June 28th, Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells rules largely in favor of IBMs "Motion to Limit The SCO Group Inc.s Claims Relating to Allegedly Misused Material." This means that the vast majority of SCOs claims against IBM for misusing Unix code in Linux have been thrown out.

Since SCO first began claiming that IBM had placed its Unix intellectual property into Linux, opponents to its arguments, such as Linus Torvalds, have demanded that SCO show precise proof for its claims. In its motion, IBM took a similar tack.

IBM had asked that the US District Court in Salt Lake City dismiss 198 of SCOs claimed 294 examples of IBM contributing Unix code to Linux. IBM argued that the court should grant this because, "SCO does not provide enough particularity even to identify the versions or line numbers for the allegedly misused material," in its memorandum supporting this motion.

"In fact, no versions, files or lines of Unix System V code are identified; no versions, files or lines of Dynix or AIX code are identified as misused; and no specific versions or lines of Linux code are identified," IBMs attorneys said at the time.

Now, with the exception of ten items, the court has come down firmly on IBMs side.

Judge Wells wrote, "Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus, they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that you know what you stole Im not telling. Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus entire inventory and say its in there somewhere, you figure it out."

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