IBM Says SCO Willfully Failed To Detail Evidence

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.'"

Comments

Two Words for IBM--Edit Distance

[eldavojohn]

In college, my professor had a class of a couple hundred freshmen and the problem of making sure no one was copying anyone else's code for trivial homework assignments. It's a similar problem, how do we solve it?

His solution was a simple edit distance program that checked every pair-wise set of homework assignment's source code. You could thus find the highest areas of similar work between two pieces of code or even documents. A simple algorithm--it's the engineer way.

When I took a course in computational biology (or bioinformatics), I was enlightened to the BLAST and FASTA algorithms that could be useful in this case. Basically, you could search by global alignment or some form of local alignment (reducing and increasing complexity of the algorithm, respectively). These algorithms work already with protein chains and DNA so they are more than capable of large sets of data computed quickly and effectively.

The article lists SCO submitting 45,000 pages of evidence and materials--of which I assume is SCO's own work. What IBM could choose to do is have them scanned and provide the court with the alleged infringing documents to check against. The localized areas that score the highest could then be inspected by IBM and give their lawyers ample time to start a defense against points in the documents that will probably be areas of attack for SCO. In fact, it's entirely possible that SCO used this method to quickly identify what it thought to be points of infringement in code.

But of course, like most Slashdot posters, I'd rather just see the judge turn to SCO and say, "Bullshit, case dismissed..." and proceed to tell them off like Judge Judy giving a deadbeat father a taste of the back o' her hand.

Re:Two Words for IBM--Edit Distance

[networkBoy]

There are problems with that system though.
My wife's writing style is rather uniform and predictable.
The database she works from is the same regardless of the calss she is taking, she writes papers and whatnot for her masters/doctoral work (I'm coding an indexing on-line library of reference documents that is more easily searchable).
This database of documentation is a superset of what she had when she was taking her BS degree classes (same data and sourcework, plus new sourcework and data, plus her previous papers).
She has been brought up for plagerism because her paper too closely resembled another paper turned into the same on-line system to detect cheaters, and a published work on the same subject. Problem is, the paper that was used as a reference was one of her bachelor papers, and the published work was also hers (thus no plagerism). Had the teacher not discussed this with her before talking with the dean, this could have turned out rather badly.

How are systems like this to defend against such issues, I for one do not trust that every teacher / prof / dean will do the right thing, and would rather rubber stamp a transcript with the expelled mark for plagerism rather than look at the possibility that the student is simply leveraging some of their previous hard work...
-nB

Re:Two Words for IBM--Edit Distance

[Chris Burke]

This is why being a programmer has made me even more against having machines in charge. It should be unthinkable that you could use a computer program to detect plagiarism and expell someone without having a human being look into the issue. Computers execute hard-coded algorithms without fail, which does not account for the algorithm itself being flawed, or situations outside the scope of the algorithm (like the "plagiarism" coming from one of the author's previous works).

I was a TA for an operating systems class, and we used automated tools to detect possible plagiarism, but this was only the first step. Human inspection revealed that some was in fact plagiarism, but there were also false positives. We weren't exactly surprised; it was assumed this was possible and that human investigation was necessary. We never considered "rubber stamping" the verdict of the program.

People who trust computers don't understand them. People who use computers to make decisions for them (rather than provide data to inform their own decisions) are lazy. Combine the two, and bad things happen.

Re:Two Words for IBM--Edit Distance

[nadamsieee]

It is just me or is slashdot in the habit of pretending sites like Groklaw doesn't exist? Groklaw had the scoop a full day before the Computer Business Review article (which probably used Groklaw as its primary source anyway). I don't think this is some corporate conspiracy against Groklaw; I just wonder if Slashdot is having a hard time coping with the fact that specialized blogs, rss feeds, and aggregators like Thunderbird are doing a much better job of providing what Slashdot provided in the past... So the editors don't post articles that directly link to the 'competition'.

Re:Two Words for IBM--Edit Distance

[vux984]

What IBM could choose to do is have them scanned and provide the court with the alleged infringing documents to check against. The localized areas that score the highest could then be inspected by IBM and give their lawyers ample time to start a defense against points in the documents that will probably be areas of attack for SCO.

First, it is not IBMs job to identify things that might be infringing. It is up to SCO to identify them.

Second, forcing IBM to waste its resources identifying "possible" attacks and defending against them only serves SCO's strategy of wasting IBMs time and money.

SCO has wasted enough of IBMs time and resources with their discovery demands. If SCO didn't discover anything, or won't identify anything, its certainly not IBMs job to do THAT for them too.

Re:Innocent until proven guilty.

[faedle]

SCO's claims have been, and remain, far more complicated than that.

SCO's claim is not necessarily that IBM stole code that they have a patent on. SCO's claim revolves around a contract that SCO and IBM have, and that IBM breached that contract by submitting code IBM wrote to Linux, and that IBM was contractually bound by SCO to not do that. SCO is not claiming (at least, from what I read) that IBM didn't write the code, just that IBM did not have the right to release the code to a third party without SCO's "approval" or licensing.

Yes, I agree SCO is being a bunch of ninnys, and I think that this is the crux of this motion by IBM.

That being said, this case isn't as simple as you make it out to be. SCO is saying, in essence, that "IBM violated our contract by submitting code that [contractually] we own to Linux". Part of SCO's "evidence" of this wrongdoing is the contract itself: what does the contract say? What are the terms? What constitutes "submitting" and "violation", in the framework of the contract?

Because this is not "simple common law" we're talking about here, it requires a certain amount of arbitration.

The system is working. I have no doubt that when this is all said and done, not only will IBM be victorious, but it will resolve once and for all the "legal questions" involving Linux and Open Source software generically.

This is partially why I don't believe there is any real Microsoft-SCO conspiracy.. because the last thing Microsoft really wants is a clearly defined court case that resolves the IP issues involved with Linux.. and for that matter, with the whole AT&T/BSD "who really owns UNIX" issue entirely.

SCO's initial claim may seem preposterous to us in the Open Source "community", but outside of our knowledge of the way things work, things are a bit murky. By the time this is done, the waters will be clear.. trust me. IBM wouldn't be fighting it if it wouldn't.

These people are brilliant

[PenguinBoyDave]

Think about it...the lawyers and other talking heads at SCO have managed, for some time now, to keep this company afloat on pure BS alone, and they did it by spoofing the courts, the media, etc. Sure...Tech people saw right past it, but the fact is that they were to do a job...to keep this company alive, and they did it for a long time. This might be the death-blow for them, but hey, they did a hell of a job getting it this far.

Now...let the ship sink. Should have gone down long ago.

Re:IBM's stance

[greg_barton]

...I know I'm not the only one that has been frustrated by all the shenanigans that SCO's lawyers and management have been allowed to pull...

Have you ever studied Aikido? It's a martial art that stresses defense, and specifically using the attacker's energy against them. In Aikido you let the attacker attack, as hard as they can. Only when they become off balance, often by attacking too hard, do you "help them" to the ground.

In this light the IBM strategy makes perfect sense: let SCO do as much as possible to hang themselves. Then, when they are least balanced (and most confident in their own greatness and your apparent incompetance) you tip them over and help them destroy themselves.

Re:IBM's stance

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Have you ever studied Aikido? It's a martial art that stresses defense, and specifically using the attacker's energy against them. In Aikido you let the attacker attack, as hard as they can. Only when they become off balance, often by attacking too hard, do you "help them" to the ground.

I was thinking more of hard Aikido (where you occasionally punch the other guy) or Ninpo, where you actively control the space and manipulate the other guy into beating themself down.