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Analysis of SCO vs. IBM

Posted by michael on from the paper-pushing dept.

icantblvitsnotbutter writes "An excellent -- and clear! -- article over at LinuxWorld.com has a multipoint analysis of SCO's 40-page complaint (this is a brief?!). For all those IANAL's out there, here's something to sink your teeth into. On the balance, the outlook seems positive for IBM. Still, the parallel invocation of a contractural clause potentially nixing AIX lends some credence to claims that this is a just way for SCO to coerce IBM into buying them out..." Some old documents from a similar lawsuit have surfaced, and naturally ESR has his own take on the case.

4 of 282 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Almost nothing new here by Tony-A · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Looks like that ownership may be a bit tainted. (emphasis added)

    The suit was settled after the University threatened to countersue over license violations by AT&T and USL. It seems that from as far back as before 1985, the historical Bell Labs codebase had been incorporating large amounts of software from the BSD sources. The University's cause of action lay in the fact that AT&T, USL and Novell had routinely violated the terms of the BSD license by removing license attributions and copyrights.

    The exact terms of final settlement, and much of the judicial record, were sealed at Novell's insistence.

  2. This is all about PROJECT MONTEREY!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is not about UNIX!!! This is about PROJECT MONTEREY!!!

    Monterey was a real, live, flesh and blood endeavor in which SCO and IBM partnered to write a new, 64-bit, proprietary Über-Unix on Intel hardware. SCO committed real, live, flesh and blood engineers to the project, and real, honest to goodness, cold, hard cash. IBM walked away from the table. The question is: How much SCO intellectual property did IBM walk away with, and how much of it found its way to IBM's Linux projects? If, through discovery, SCO can prove that a substantial number of IBM's Project Monterey engineers were re-assigned to IBM Linux projects, then SCO will have a reasonably solid foundation on which to proceed with the case.

    This is no different than Intergraph's highly successful court cases against Intel, in which Intergraph proved that Intel had stolen substantial amounts of Intergraph intellectual property.

    Google on Project Monterey SCO IBM

    Google on Intergraph Intel

  3. Claims sound awfully inflated. by cenonce · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'd really be interested to see what kind of damages SCO can prove. They may end up racking up millions in dollar of legal fees for a very small reward, if any.

    Even the IBM/AT&T agreement is valid, I'd be surprised if IBM wasn't smart enough to isolate engineers with knowledge of SCO Unix source code from engineers assisting in the Linux development. I mean, c'mon, IBM has been in the computer industry since ENIAC and has been in business almost twice that long! Does anybody really believe IBM can't write a non-disclosure agreement and isolate its employees? SCO makes it sound like the 7,000 IBM engineers working on Linux are the only engineers IBM has, thus, IBM must have violated trade secrets! PLEASE! IBM employs hundreds of thousand of people and probably 10 times the number of engineers they have working on Linux.

    Just because IBM has thrown some effort into Linux, doesn't mean they are tossing AIX out the window. It is probably a wait and see... if Linux really catches on, we can move AIX enterprises over and add Linux enterprises with the benefits of the GPL. IBM is now a service provider, and the reality is, the only way you make money with Linux is providing service.

    It'll be interesting to see how much the lawyers end up making out of all this.

    -Anthony



  4. SCO needs a history lesson... by 0xB00F · · Score: 5, Interesting

    One of the major gripes of SCO is that Linux would not have been able to have SMP support if it weren't for IBM lifting SCO Unix code and handing it out for the kernel developers.

    Perhaps they should read this article at IBM DeveloperWorks. This page pretty much explains why IBM decided to go the way of the fat penguin.

    It should be worth pointing out this quote from the article:

    One of the areas where Linux has an advantage on the FreeBSD community is in SMP, or multiprocessor support. Linux has supported SMP for about five years while FreeBSD has supported it for about two years. As a result, the Linux's support for SMP is considerably more mature than FreeBSD. Due to the open source nature of both systems, this will not be the case for long. FreeBSD developers have the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the Linux developers.
    Linux has had support for SMP waaaaaay long before IBM adopted it and apparently this was one of their reasons for adopting Linux. I also read in a magazine once (I think it was Time or Newsweek c.a. 1998 IIRC but someone please correct the date :-D) that in one of the numerous Linux shows, one of the participants was able to make Linux run on a machine with 4 Xeon processors.

    Plus there is also the fact that a year before IBM adopted Linux, they (among others)made large hardware available to Linux developers for testing and benchmarks.

    0xB00F disappears in a puff of smoke...