News

SCO Dealt Setback in IBM Linux Lawsuit

U.S. magistrate strikes down many of SCO Group's claims against IBM, saying SCO failed to show intellectual property was misappropriated when IBM donated code to Linux operating system project.

(Salt Lake City) A U.S. magistrate has struck down many of the SCO Group Inc.'s claims against IBM Corp., saying the Utah company failed to show its intellectual property was misappropriated when Big Blue donated software code to the freely distributed Linux operating system.

Magistrate Brooke Wells dismissed 182 of SCO's 294 claims, dealing a major setback to SCO's $5 billion lawsuit.

The suit, filed in 2003, accused IBM of donating SCO's Unix code to Linux developers, but Wells ruled SCO had produced virtually no proof of the allegation.

She said SCO had "willfully failed to comply" with court orders to show IBM which of millions of lines of code in Linux were supposedly misappropriated. SCO argued that was IBM's job.

Wells likened SCO's stance to a security guard who accuses a shopper of stealing merchandise _ and demands the shopper show proof of the theft.

"It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole; I'm not telling,'" Wells wrote in a 39-page decision signed Wednesday.

The magistrate said that if there was any merit to SCO's claims, they were likely to produce only nominal damages instead of billions of dollars.

"It is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage despite being repeatedly told to put 'all evidence ... on the table,'" she wrote.

Wells dismissed SCO's arguments that only IBM engineers could verify that IBM gave away proprietary software code to Linux, a work of thousands of developers around the world.

"SCO's arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM, 'Sorry, we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know,'" the magistrate wrote.

SCO acknowledged Friday that the ruling was a setback, but spokesman Blake Stowell said the company would continue to press its case. He said the magistrate dismissed general claims but kept several major ones that assert lines of Unix code were dumped into Linux.

The ruling capped a month of bad news for SCO. The company reported $4.69 million in losses for its most recent quarter, including nearly $3.8 million in new litigation expenses.

Any appeal would go to U.S. District Judge David Kimball, who has already upheld an evidence-related ruling by Wells that SCO had appealed.

IBM spokesman John Charlson said the company doesn't comment on litigation, but that Wells' ruling "says it all."

SCO doesn't have enough evidence "to shake a stick at," said Pamela Jones, creator and editor of Groklaw.net, a Web site devoted to open-source software legal issues.

"Linux is booming, and everyone knows now that the code has been examined every which way, and it's clean as code can be," she said.

Featured

  • Microsoft Appoints Althoff as New CEO for Commercial Business

    Microsoft CEO and chairman Satya Nadella on Wednesday announced the promotion of Judson Althoff to CEO of the company's commercial business, presenting the move as a response to the dramatic industrywide shifts caused by AI.

  • Broadcom Revamps VMware Partner Program Again

    Broadcom recently announced a significant update regarding its VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program, coinciding with the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, a key component in Broadcom’s private cloud strategy.

  • Closeup of the new Copilot keyboard key

    Microsoft Updates Copilot To Add Context-Sensitive Agents to Teams, SharePoint

    Microsoft has rolled out a new public preview for collaborative "always on" agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing enhanced, context-aware tools into Teams channels, meetings, SharePoint sites, Planner workstreams and Viva Engage communities.

  • Windows 365 Cloud Apps Now Available for Public Preview

    Microsoft announced this week that Windows 365 Cloud Apps are now available for public preview. This aims to allow IT administrators to stream individual Windows applications from the cloud, removing the need to assign Cloud PCs to every user.