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: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.