Slashdot Mirror
SCO Spreads Rumors About IBM Lawsuit
yeremein writes "SCO says it has found a new smoking gun in its battle with IBM. This 'bombshell' was not found in a court document; instead it came from a reporter's interview at SCOforum. The scoop? 'SCO alleges that since 2001, AIX has contained code for which IBM does not have a license. Moreover SCO claims to have found internal IBM e-mails in which IBMers acknowledge this shortcoming.' With the announcement comes a hefty boost in SCO's stock price." SCO is also going to bundle its worthless linux licenses with its Unix operating systems.
Isn't this libel by SCO? Unless they can show substantial evidence, they are tarnishing IBM's reputation for personal gain. Even then, this is the type of thing that should be restricted to court. Would IBM be able to sue for wrongful damages?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Or perhaps I have it all backwards, but how can the stock go up 14% without this sort of thing happening?
SCO have discovered about 5 or 6 "smoking guns" and they never turn out to be anything. Still, it hasn't been groklaw'd yet so we can't be sure what's going on. ;-)
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
Their Lanham Act counterclaims in the lawsuit that SCO filed are directly referring to this type of behavior.
I think the most insightful, or at least amusing, thing I've read about this case lately was found at the bottom of the forbes article:
Indeed, SCO says the company's biggest investor, BayStar Capital, has been pushing SCO to drop its Unix business altogether and simply become a litigation machine, bringing intellectual property-related lawsuits. But SCO insists it remains committed to selling Unix software--when it's not busy fighting people in court.
I'm glad groklaw is around:
"The next generation of AIX--AIX 5L--takes AIX to the next level with advanced technology, a strong Linux affinity and added support for IBM's Power and Intel's future IA-64 processor-based platforms, making it the most open UNIX operating system in the industry."
-- http://www.sco.com/monterey/aix5l.htm
I wonder why SCOG removed that page, then got it removed from the wayback machine and google cache so fast after that story was up on groklaw.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
Most likely it is not baloney. SCO and IBM were mixing things up pretty good for many years. IBM may have missed an i dotting/t crossing and may have realized it later. I would guess that SCO has some sort of grounds to go after IBM on this mix-up. I doubt that it has ANY relavency to linux or any of their other cases.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Whats most interesting about this story (and I'll reserve ANY judgement until I see it in court - I'm still waiting for SCO's copyright claims to be filed since Dec 2003, and that was promised in open court!) is whats NOT being talked about. What happened to Linux? In this instance certainly, and more generally all during SCOForum, SCO has been talking about Unix, and ignoring Linux. I think this is a great show of their final admittance that their Linux claims/cases are bogus. In regards to the "smoking bullet", they just didn't "find" this stuff today, they have had it for a while I'd assume, and I haven't seen any amendments in court. Not to mention, discovery is almost finished, and I would bet there are contradictory documents (affidavitts, deps) SCO has certified that say nothing of this. Didn't IBM ask SCO already (and they replied) regarding violations of SCO code in Linux, Dynix, and AIX?
SCO and IBM teamed up to work on a 64 bit version of UNIX for 64 bit Intel processors. IBM backed out of the deal and in doing so SCO claims IBM also backed out of their licensing agreement for SVR4 code.
Except that:
1) SCO has never claimed any such thing in any court filing. Their court filings don't make anything approaching clear claims that A didn't receive a license for code B from C or anything else you would expect in such a claim.
2) IBM already had a license for SVR4 code at the time of montery
3) SCO didn't have rights to sell such a license in any meaningful sense
Now, IBM developers have been contributing a lot to the Linux kernel. Who do you think they got to write the kernel code? Probably a good chance that it was people that were familiar with AIX.
Actually that is explicitly not the case. There is a Chinese wall between the AIX group and the Linux group to avoid certain really copyright problems (none of which involve SCO BTW). Communication between them is controlled.
my point is that everyone should try and look at what's going on objectively because there is a lot at stake
Look at the threads from 2 years ago when this started. People here did look at SCO's filings very carefully. After many many repeated inaccuracies and lies in SCO's comments to reporters and inaccuracies which show an extreme lack of knowledge in their court fillings people rightfully treat their factual claims as false until proven otherwise. Similarly their legal claims have been nonsensical.
There is nothing at stake. Imagine if SCO had filed a wrongful death suit against IBM and everyone could show the supposed victim was till alive. Obviously SCO would get their day in court but no one would pretend there was any merit to the case; which is the proper way of dealing with this type of nonsense lawsuit.