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IBM Says SCO Willfully Failed To Detail Evidence

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the suspiciously-vague dept.

Robert wrote to mention a piece on CBR Online where the latest volley in the SCO case is covered. IBM is now accusing SCO of having acted in bad faith when they opened the trial against IBM, by being purposefully vague in their evidence. From the article: "All in all, according to IBM, SCO's evidence filing makes it impossible for the company to defend itself. 'By failing to provide adequate reference points, SCO has left IBM no way to evaluate its claims without surveying the entire universe of potentially relevant code and guessing ... Since only SCO knows what its claims are, requiring such an exercise of IBM would be as senseless and unfair as it would be Herculean.'"

2 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Grocklaw's take by Simon+Brooke · · Score: 5, Informative

    Grocklaw's take here, and it makes good reading:

    "What an extraordinary response to the court's orders. As IBM points out, because SCO fails to "identify with specificity the versions, files and lines of System V, AIX, Dynix and Linux material that IBM is alleged to have misused," as a practical matter, it just isn't possible to evaluate SCO's claims. We're talking about a lot of code. IBM references a Declaration of Todd Shaughnessy, which we don't yet have, which says "there are at least 11 versions, 112,622 files and 23,802,817 lines of System V code potentially implicated by SCO's claims. There are at least 9 versions, 1,079,986 files and 1,216,698,259 lines of AIX code potentially implicated by SCO's claims. There are at least 37 versions of the base operating system, and 472,176 files and 156,757,842 lines of Dynix code potentially implicated by SCO's claims. And there are at least 597 versions, 3,485,859 files and 1,394,381,543 lines of Linux code potentially implicated to SCO's claims." Precisely where in this massive pile of code should IBM start digging?

    ...

    "I feel sure we'll hear more on this topic at the hearing coming up. I have this vague memory that SCO told Magistrate Judge Wells, when she asked them at a recent hearing if they'd found anything of use in those materials, that they had."
    --
    I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
  2. Re:Two Words for IBM--Edit Distance by AstrumPreliator · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know much about the BLAST and FASTA algorithms, but the Levenshtein distance just compares strings. Simply rename everything and tweak the structure of your code somewhat and it can give false results. I know here at university they run all source code through a program (forget the name) that analyzes control flow and other program characteristics and then compare it to those of other students, past students, and source code from the web.

    I don't know how effective the program is as I don't cheat, but I do know a few students in the department that have nearly been suspended.

    However, your last statement is spot on, the judge should throw them out of court ;).