Who's afraid of the big bad SCO?
Has anything good ever come out of Utah? Certainly not SCO.
SCO was ordered by the court to "disclose with specificity all allegedly misused material identified to date."
In response to SCO's recent filing, nominally in compliance with that order, IBM says of 198 out of the 201 items noted "SCO does not provide a complete set of reference points (version, file and line) for any of the 198 items. Astonishingly, SCO fails specifically to identify a single line of System V, AIX or Dynix, and Linux code for any of the 198 items." According to IBM's response to the filing, the remaining three items are also without merit, but at least bear the appearance of compliance so that IBM will deal with them at summary judgment rather than in its initial response. "This motion is directed only to 198 of the items because SCO's disclosures as to those items are utterly lacking in the required detail." They're not even worth taking to summary judgment. Furthermore, "It is beyond reasonable debate that SCO acted willfully in not specifying its claims. The court made it perfectly clear what SCO was required to do."
"To create the false impression that it has provided information that it has not provided, SCO tells the court that it has provided 'color-coded illustrations', 'line-by-line source code comparisons' and 'over 45,000 pages of supporting materials'," IBM said in relation to SCO's opposition brief. "What SCO fails to mention is that 33,000 of those pages concern item 294, which SCO abandons in its opposition brief."
Is there more that's wrong with the 201 items? You betcha. "Moreover, while the Final Disclosures include color-coded illustrations and line-by-line source comparisons, they do not do so with regard to any of the 198 items at issue."
In summary: "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." Yeah. Throw darts at 5.7 million lines of source code and see if you hit something relevant.
Two good things would come of IBM actually doing an exhaustive survey of the Linux kernel's source code for matches with code for which SCO claims copyright:
Actually (if I remember the timing correctly) at the time of SCO's original complaint, it seems there were about 2.4 million lines of source code, and SCO was claiming 1.1 million lines of code infringed on SCO's copyrights. Say what? In the period between the 2.2 and 2.4 kernels (when the malfeasance supposedly occurred, I believe), there wasn't enough time to incorporate anywhere near 1.1 million new lines of source code from any single source. That would have required willfully setting out to create the biggest copyright infringement SNAFU in the history of computer software and for probably half of IBM's programmer staff to stop doing anything else for that entire period but copy and integrate source code, throwing out great gobs of source code that was legitimately generated by the open source development community at large for no other reason than to make more room for copyright-infringing code. What kind of asinine nonsense is this?
SCO was ordered by the court to "disclose with specificity all allegedly misused material identified to date."
In response to SCO's recent filing, nominally in compliance with that order, IBM says of 198 out of the 201 items noted "SCO does not provide a complete set of reference points (version, file and line) for any of the 198 items. Astonishingly, SCO fails specifically to identify a single line of System V, AIX or Dynix, and Linux code for any of the 198 items." According to IBM's response to the filing, the remaining three items are also without merit, but at least bear the appearance of compliance so that IBM will deal with them at summary judgment rather than in its initial response. "This motion is directed only to 198 of the items because SCO's disclosures as to those items are utterly lacking in the required detail." They're not even worth taking to summary judgment. Furthermore, "It is beyond reasonable debate that SCO acted willfully in not specifying its claims. The court made it perfectly clear what SCO was required to do."
"To create the false impression that it has provided information that it has not provided, SCO tells the court that it has provided 'color-coded illustrations', 'line-by-line source code comparisons' and 'over 45,000 pages of supporting materials'," IBM said in relation to SCO's opposition brief. "What SCO fails to mention is that 33,000 of those pages concern item 294, which SCO abandons in its opposition brief."
Is there more that's wrong with the 201 items? You betcha. "Moreover, while the Final Disclosures include color-coded illustrations and line-by-line source comparisons, they do not do so with regard to any of the 198 items at issue."
In summary: "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." Yeah. Throw darts at 5.7 million lines of source code and see if you hit something relevant.
Two good things would come of IBM actually doing an exhaustive survey of the Linux kernel's source code for matches with code for which SCO claims copyright:
- SCO would be substantively and without question fed their own damned feet.
- Some bugs would get fixed in the process.
Actually (if I remember the timing correctly) at the time of SCO's original complaint, it seems there were about 2.4 million lines of source code, and SCO was claiming 1.1 million lines of code infringed on SCO's copyrights. Say what? In the period between the 2.2 and 2.4 kernels (when the malfeasance supposedly occurred, I believe), there wasn't enough time to incorporate anywhere near 1.1 million new lines of source code from any single source. That would have required willfully setting out to create the biggest copyright infringement SNAFU in the history of computer software and for probably half of IBM's programmer staff to stop doing anything else for that entire period but copy and integrate source code, throwing out great gobs of source code that was legitimately generated by the open source development community at large for no other reason than to make more room for copyright-infringing code. What kind of asinine nonsense is this?