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