SCO Up To It’s Old Tricks

Looks like SCO is trying to move the goalposts again – this time they have introduced new allegations way after the final deadline for such and IBM is mightily annoyed.

First they provide a brief rundown of what was supposed to happen:

As the Court is aware, IBM has asked for years that SCO specify its allegations of misconduct by IBM. Ultimately, after repeated motions to compel and for summary judgment necessitated by SCO’s refusal to disclose the materials at issue in the case, the Court entered an order setting October 28, 2005 as the “Interim Deadline for Parties to Disclose with Specificity All Allegedly Misused Material” and December 22, 2005 as the “Final Deadline for Parties to Identify with Specificity All Allegedly Misused Material.” The parties also reached an agreement that both parties were required to identify with specificity any and all material that each party contends the other has misused no later than December 22,2005. Both parties submitted such materials on the required dates, and advised the Court that they had nothing more to provide.

then they explain how they believe that SCO is abusing the rules of court:

Despite this, three of SCO’s May 19, 2006 expert reports, those of Drs. Cargill and Ivie and Mr. Rochkind, significantly exceed the scope of the Final Disclosures – indeed, Dr. Cargill’s report effectively seeks to reinvent the case, introducing both new categories of allegedly misused material and a new theory of recovery which relates to them. The Rochkind and Ivie Reports also exceed the Final Disclosures, adding material never before disclosed by SCO. SCO’s refusal to identify exactly what is at issue in this case more than three years into the litigation — and nearly six months after the expiration of its Court-ordered deadline to do so — should be rejected. If allowed to ignore the Court’s Order in this way, SCO will have drastically expanded the scope of this case, just weeks before IBM’s opposing expert reports are due and just months before the dispositive motion cut-off, all to IBM’s substantial prejudice.

In their supporting documentation IBM notes that SCO now claim to own virtually everything:

SCO’s new copyright claims regarding the overall structure of SVr4, the structure of the entire SVr4 file system and system calls are not minor additions to the Final Disclosures. On the contrary, they represent a significant departure from the Final Disclosures. The Final Disclosures’ copyright allegations implicated only 12 Linux kernel files and 326 lines of code from the kernel.3 Since SCO’s new theories challenge the overall structure of Linux and its file system, they appear to implicate virtually every file in Linux, which is comprised of millions lines of code. As a practical matter, the Cargill report effectively pleads a brand new and complex (although still meritless) case.

To add to the general sense of SCO’s desperation IBM note that they now claim to own the entirety of STREAMS and the entirety of the ELF ABI, including the magic number for ELF executables!

The Cargill report also introduces into this case, for the first time, claims to the ELF “magic number” (Cargill Rpt. at 76-78) (a unique pattern identifying the type and intended use of a file).

How annoyed are IBM – well about this annoyed..

Although we do not burden the Court with a request for sanctions, we believe an order entering sanctions, including the costs of this motion, would be justified.

Via Groklaw

IBM run out of patience, SCO runs out of road..

Well well well, here’s an interesting turnup in the SCO vs IBM case that’s been dragging on and on for years.

SCO finally had to submit a list of what they were accusing IBM of, with specificity,and did so with a list of 294 alleged misdeeds that they filed under seal, so the rest of the world couldn’t see. Obviously they’d gotten fed up with the world pulling the rest of their previous allegations apart.

But now IBM have hit back, they’ve filed a motion in the court to strike 201 of those 294 allegations immediately because, surprise surprise, SCO give no evidence at all for them. Apparently they don’t cite any lines of code from Linux, AIX, Dynix or System V to support those particular 201 allegations. What makes it worse from SCOs point of view is that IBM wrote to them on the 5th December 2005 pointing this out and giving them the opportunity to fix it, but they ignored the warning. So IBM has done the only thing that they could in the circumstance and asked the court to strike these items, mentioning in passing that SCOs unresponsiveness to flag that it’s probably not worth ordering them to do anything as they’ve already been asked and had over 2 months to provide extra details.

The sorts of things SCO is up to are time wasting tricks like this (to pick a random example):

Item Nos. 271 and 294 of the Final Disclosures illustrate the problem. Item No. 271 claims that “AIX and Dynix/ptx patented technologies, based on UNIX System V, were improperly released for the benefit of, and use by, the Linux development community in developing Linux.” SCO does not identify a single version, file or line of Unix System V, AIX, Dynix or Linux technology that IBM is alleged to have misused. Instead, SCO merely attaches 34 patents. None of these 34 patents lists any versions, files or lines of code. There is, therefore, no way of telling what, if any, Unix System V, AIX, Dynix or Linux technology SCO contends was misused.

But this is probably only the first in a series of blows to SCO, as if the court does rule that SCO have not produced any particularised details for these allegations as the court had ordered (several times) and strike these allegations then IBM can start on those where they’ve got some idea about what SCO is prattling on about and then it’ll get interesting when we see what they then do to defend themselves.

There is already something about this foreshadowed in a footnote to the filing where IBM say:

In Item No. 204, SCO provides a comparison of System V source code and Dynix source code to support the unremarkable, and uncontested, proposition that the Dynix operating system contains certain code modified or derived from System V source code; neither party contests the fact that IBM (through Sequent) had a valid license to include System V source code in Dynix. In fact, as noted above, SCO makes no claim of misuse of the material identified in Item No. 204. (See supra note 1.)

Truly a Homer Simpson moment.. D’oh!

SCO, the 10-Q form, IBM, Linux and Microsoft

As most people involved with Linux and who aren’t hiding under a rock will know, SCO have begun legal action against IBM over alleged trade secret breaches in the US. They’ve also been bad mouthing the Linux community and claiming that code from Linux has been taken from their UNIX codebase. To this end LinuxTag and various German Linux companies have obtained an injunction against SCO in Germany to prevent them from repeating allegations which they refuse to publically prove.
Anyway, one of the latest developments in this have been quite interesting, in that Microsoft went and bought a UNIX license from SCO. The conspiracy theorists went ballistic over this, saying that MS were essentially funding SCO to damage Linux.
In the light of all this, SCO’s recent filing of it’s form 10-Q (a US Securities and Exchange Commission document, legally binding) makes for very interesting reading. The brief notes are:

  • SCO believes that the legal action may damage their business in the long run.
  • Apart from MS there has been only one other (unnamed) SCOSource licensee.
  • These two licensees contributed over $8 million to SCO’s revenue.
  • The unnamed SCOSource licensee has also been offered up to 210,000 shares of SCO at $1.83 a share. SCO is currently trading around $10!
  • SCO describes the SCOSource UNIX license as “perpetual”.

For more info read on….

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