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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.'"
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.
My work here is dung.
Grocklaw's take here, and it makes good reading:
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I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Since the general opinion seems to be that SCO is simply attempting to cause discord in the unix market, is this really so suprising?
Lets look at the facts here, SCO is filing lawsuits all over the place, being very vague on the specifics of the lawsuit, all of which ties the courts up and drags out the cases. There is a lot of publicity about how *NIX variants may be breaching all these copyrights, IP's, and licenses, which in the long term reduces confidence in *NIX since consumers can't be sure that the product they are investing money in may suddenly get pulled.
IMHO the money M$ has pushed towards SCO is entirely related to this case, by tying these vendors to the courts and reducing consumer confidence people are more likely to buy M$ products rather than face the risk of getting hurt with the outcome of these lawsuits.
I think these cases should all be thrown out, SCO has a fairly damning track record of lawsuits for the sake or lawsuits, regardless of the validity of the claims.
GeekServ Unix Consulting Services (http://www.geekserv.com)
.. is for IBM to figure out where SCO's code is. Is that so much to ask for?
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
The other 3 items are now listed here in all their glory:
//
/*
*/
IBM Willfully copied these lines and should burn in hell.
liqbase
The goal of SCO's intentionally vague requests seem to be to essentially consume the defendant's resources. It's more a fishing expedition than a court case, and falls in line with SCO's FUD strategies.
My sig is too lon
This is one case that needs to be taken to the end by IBM, putting SCO in the grave and establishing base of case law to protect linux in the future. Stopping now would not be a good idea. And besides that, it's not IBM's job to find with specifity what code SCO accuses them of infringing. At this point it would seem that SCO can not find anything of the sort. After all of this time (3 years?) the hot air in SCO is blowing out there asses as they wined down like a deflated balloon.
What I find really enjoyable is the more-aggressive stance IBM's lawyers have taken in recent filings.
Not trying to call them pansies for their actions in the past, and clearly they understand the US court system far better than I ever hope to; but 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 since this thing started three freekin years ago.
But IBM hasn't pulled any punches lately, going for the jugular with this reply memo and its requests for discovery (asking for details in SCO's relationship with Baystar is gonna reveal beaucoup scummage, imho).
Anyone have a deathwatch-type clock running for SCO?
Try not. Do... or do not. There is no try. ~Yoda
How can it be possible to put a corporation to tens of millions of dollars of direct legal costs and hard to estimate indirect damages without ever needing to demonstrate any evidence of a case to answer? Judge Kimball, himself, stated in his decision on summary judgment (over 18 months after the case was originally initiated) that it was "astonishing" that SCO had provided no evidence, in spite of all their public pronouncements, but then said it was premature to render a decision because SCO might still be able to find some evidence somewhere of some wrongdoing through the discovery process. This has been explained as necessary to avoid the risk of SCO later making a successful appeal.
It seems to me that the US legal system is designed to make money for lawyers and the interests of the parties themselves is purely secondary. I fear comparison with the 19th century British system lampooned so sucessfully by Dicken's Bleak House is not kind to the current US legal system.
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.
Wait a second.... who ever said that SCO knows what its claims are?
Well, I really don't understand what's all the din and noise about.
Innocent until proven guilty is one of staples of US justice system. You can't walk into the court and say 'My neighbor stole something from me' and then leave it to the defendant to prove that everything in his appartment was actually purchased and owned by him, not you. You kinda need to say 'My neighbor stole my TV. Here's the warranty for the said TV I bought, with my name on it, and with serial of TV that's now on my neighbor's shelf.' Admittedly, the above example is vastly simplified, yet I think it would apply just fine to any copyright / patent infringement lawsuit. You can't just say you own patents to 'some of the code' in someone else's software, and then expect them to prove they own all the code - you have to specify which of the code in defendant's software is, allegedly, protected under the patents you hold.
No proof, no case.
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
Rumour says that SCO has given IBM a reference book to help find the copyrighted material.
How can you have a comment complaining about a lack of a link to Groklaw and not link to Groklaw??
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All