When The SCO Group Inc. decided to subpoena Oracle Corp., Intel Corp., and The Open Group Inc. (an open-standards group that holds the Unix trademark) for information dealing with Unix, IBM and SCO, at the last minute, there were doubts about whether SCO could actually do this. Those doubts have been settled: No, SCO cant.
According to several Groklaw reports from the U.S. District Court hearing in Salt Lake City, Utah, Judge Brooke Wells observed that, according to her October 12, 2005 order, all discovery depositions must be completed by the cutoff date.
SCO argued that it had given the companies adequate time to meet the demands of the discovery depositions.
Unimpressed, Brooke ruled from the bench that SCOs subpoenas of January 12th gave inadequate notice of time and were defective in both substance and service, so the judge denied SCOs request to subpoena with prejudice. This means that SCO will not be able to try again.
SCO seems to have wanted to go on a “fishing expedition” for evidence that IBM had used SCOs Unix code to improve Linux.
From the Oracle subpoena, for example, SCO wanted “Documents concerning the identification of all versions of all Oracle software products that Oracle certified for operation on any version of any UNIX-based operating system, including but not limited to UnixWare, OpenServer, AIX, HPUX, Irix, Dynix, and Linux, since January 1, 1995.”