IBM Denies Charges of Unix Theft

ahooton writes "C|net is reporting that SCO has filed a lawsuit accusing IBM of theft of it's Unix intellectual property. SCO alleges this occurred because IBM released portions of the Unix system, owned by SCO, in to Linux." While the suit is nothing new, IBM's retort is. IBM asserts it is innocent of any charges of wrongdoing. Additionally, IBM is accusing SCO of trying to stifle Linux development through the use of the courts.

Comments

And might as well add...

[zurab]

That there is the SCO reply saying that they have hired consultants and found major code duplications between UnixWare and Linux, although they will not release the information about what parts of code they are talking about that has been duplicated. Article also quotes SCO's Darl McBride:

"We feel very good about the evidence that is going to show up in court. We will be happy to show the evidence we have at the appropriate time in a court setting."

I hope they are bluffing, or IBM will just buy SCO out and be done with it.

Re:REAL Purpose

[0x0d0a]

Doesn't really mean anything. You could have a company with each share not valued as much but with many shares issued, or with few shares but each share valued highly.

Market capitalization is much more useful:

IBM:
Market Capitalization $147.9B

Caldera International:
Market Capitalization $40.2M

(Yahoo Quotes)

Barratry

[shepd]

I'm pretty sure any lawyer that helped you with this would be charged with barratry, or for vexatious litigation.

I'm not sure if individuals can be charged with something similar. You'd have to look it up. :)

Note that the charges you are laying can still have some merit, but doing them in an attempt to subdue the defence isn't legal.

IBM's Open Source Guidelines

[scottme]

IBM has a comprehensive and stricly-enforced internal set of guidelines that any employee who works on OSS projects, whether on IBM's time or on his/her own time, must read, understand, and certify compliance with. It's a condition of employment, even. And there's an approval process that must be used (and I quote):

whenever an IBM group wants to:

• start or join an OSS project with the intention of contributing code to the project and/or maintaining the code base;
  
• include third party OSS with an IBM product or service;
  
• ship some or all of an IBM product in source code form under an open source license;
  
• publish the source code for a reference implementation.
  

IANAL, but it seems to me that there must be a defensive line against the SCO suit in the mere fact that it has promulgated that policy. Of course the existence of the policy is no guarantee that it is going to be adhered to 100%, but in the (unlikely) event that SCO is able to establish that some illegal copying of their material did take place, the corporation can hold its hands up and ask what more it could have done to prevent it.

Re:Released or reimplemented?

[Anonymous Coward]

While IBM has incorporated some of their code into Linux, none if it has been from SCO.

IBM's operating system, AIX, has some code from SysV, for which SCO owns rights, but the code they've ported to Linux (such as JFS) are property of IBM.

SCO is probably trying to muddy the issues - because AIX contains both code that has been shared with Linux and code that SCO owns rights to.

However, considering that SCO has never specifically pointed out what parts of IBM's contributions to Linux supposedly violate their agreements, they have zero credibility.

Re:Ballmer Misquoted

[Surak]

Ballmer actually said: "customers will never really know who stands behind this product."

The intent is similar, but it's a subtler shade of meaning here.

Of course, people pay Red Hat and IBM and other companies money to stand behind the code. And you DO know who wrote the code anyways. Their names are all over it.