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

Grocklaw's take

[Simon Brooke]

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."

Wow 198 of 201 items without evidence.

[LiquidCoooled]

The other 3 items are now listed here in all their glory:

//

/*

*/

IBM Willfully copied these lines and should burn in hell.

Re:Wow 198 of 201 items without evidence.

[(H)elix1]

The other 3 items are now listed here in all their glory: // , /* , and */


That must be valuable SCO IP. As soon as I removed all //, /*, and */ references from the code, and most code will not compile anymore. Fortunately, it would seem my coworkers are not using any of this infringing IP.

Re:Two Words for IBM--Edit Distance

[DavidTC]

It's not, as IBM pointed out, IBM's job to find places that it did or didn't copy.

As a defendant, their job is solely to disprove the other side's case.

SCO doesn't have a case. I don't mean that their claims have no merit, although they don't. I mean they have literally not actually made a case. They have refused to sit down and say 'This is our code, and this is where you illegally copied it into Linux.'.