SCO Fails to Produce Evidence

BlueSteel writes "For those of you that need that daily SCO fix, Groklaw has the declaration of Ryan E. Tibbitts of SCO, stating why they haven't produced any evidence... and that they need recent AIX and Dynix/ptx code from IBM before they can comply."

Comments

groklaw is on its knees

[Anonymous Coward]

Here it is;

Declaration of Ryan E. Tibbitts

Wednesday, January 14 2004 @ 09:42 PM EST

Here is the Declaration of Ryan E. Tibbitts, which was attached to SCO's Notice of Compliance. It's his "Santa ate my files" document. Note that he says that he began gathering the outside directors' files only after December 12, so is Santa to blame? He writes:

"After this Court's Order on December 12, 2003, I began to coordinate the gathering of responsive information from SCO's outside directors."

The hearing was on December 5, not December 12. SCO knew from the 5th that they needed to be finished by January 12, but made no efforts until the order was signed on the 12th?

IBM served its First Set of Interrogatories and First Request for Production of Documents on SCO on June 13, 2003. Beginning in August, IBM began notifying SCO by email and telephone that their answers were deficient and requested further information, which led to an impasse and IBM filing its 1st Motion to Compel Discovery early in October and a 2nd Motion to Compel early in November.

And SCO didn't begin to coordinate the gathering of information from SCO's outside directors until December 12 and so it missed the 30-day deadline because of the Christmas holiday? I am thinking the dog ate my interrogatories might be more convincing than this.

That isn't the worst. The worst, according to my nonprogrammer's eyes, is that SCO doesn't seem to identify with specificity much of anything. Forget spectral analysis and MIT mathematicians. They looked on the internet at Linux and compared it to the versions of AIX and Dynix they had lying around and infer there could be some problems. However, they can't say for sure unless IBM turns over more modern versions of AIX and Dynix/ptx! Isn't what you get from this?

"14. I have been informed by SCO's engineers and consultants that since the only version of AIX source code that was available for comparison purposes is several years old, and predates most of IBM's contributions to Linux, it was not possible to directly compare IBM's contributions to Linux with the most likely source of those contributions, namely the missing versions of AIX (including the most recent versions).

"15. Further, we have only one CD of Dynix/ptx source code that was produced by IBM, and this CD only contains a limited history of Dynix/ptx releases. It was therefore not possible to directly compare IBM's contributions to Linux with another likely source of those contributions, namely the missing versions of Dynix/ptx.

"16. Our engineers have reached the conclusion that parts of Linux have almost certainly been copied or derived from AIX or Dynix/ptx. In those cases, confirmation of this opinion would require access to more current versions of AIX and Dynix/ptx.

"17. In some additional cases it was also possible to infer with reasonable certainty from comments in the source code that the engineer who implemented that code had experience and knowledge of the methods, sequence and structures used in either or both of Dynix/ptx and AIX. Confirmation of this would require depositions from the IBM individuals involved in programming the actual Linux modules in question."

After they get everything they list in this document from IBM, they figure they'll need 90 days to evaluate what IBM turns over. I'm not kidding. 90 more days. They'd better send Boies to court for the next hearing. This is going to be a hard sell. In fact, this is a job for Superman.

Brent O. Hatch (5715)
Mark F. James (5295)
HATCH, JAMES & DODGE, P.C.
[address, phone]

Stephen N. Zack
Mark J. Heise
BOIES, SCHILLER & FLEXNER L.L.P
[address, phone]
Attorneys for Plaintiff The SCO Group, Inc.

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
DISTRICT OF UTAH

THE SCO GROUP, INC.,
a Delaware corporation,

Plaintiff,

vs.

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES CORPORATION,
a New York corporation,

Defendant.

Civi

Re:Old version?

[be-fan]

The project was called Monterey. Merced was the code name for Itanium.

Blind escrow is great

[IronClad]

But each side advancing MD5 sums of the entire codebase is cheaper.