The SCO Group appears to be experiencing difficulties in
identifying the specific lines of code, which it alleged IBM
improperly contributed to the Linux operating system, according to
court documents.
In the filings, SCO asked the court to order IBM to produce more
materials documenting the development of its AIX and Dynix
operating systems, and argued that the files that IBM has produced
to date are "incomplete".
In March, courts ordered IBM to provide SCO with source code to
the two operating systems. SCO now claims that "the files
previously produced by IBM pursuant to this court's order show that
IBM improperly contributed code to Linux".
However, SCO's filings provide few details on the nature of
these "improper" contributions.
Since launching its multibillion-dollar lawsuit against IBM last
March, SCO has provided some examples of alleged intellectual
property (IP) violations within the Linux source code, all of which
have been strongly disputed by the open-source community.
The question of whether or not SCO even owns the copyright to
the Unix System V source code is unanswered, and SCO and Linux
supplier Novell are engaged in a legal dispute over the matter.
The court has also ordered SCO to respond to IBM's discovery
demand that it identify the specific lines of code that it claimed
IBM contributed to Linux.
SCO has, apparently, had difficulty accomplishing this task. The
filings list a number of steps SCO has taken to identify the IP
violations, but added, "these efforts have not, however, yielded
much of the information required for SCO to further respond to
IBM's discovery demands".
"SCO has attempted to follow IBM's scattered path through the
winding history of countless alterations, derivations and
revisions, but the task is nearly impossible without a map, a map
so easily accessible to IBM," the filings said.
More documentation of IBM's source code and developer
contributions is needed for SCO to respond to IBM.
The filings raise questions about how much evidence SCO actually
has about any IBM wrongdoing with respect to Linux, given that SCO
already has access to the open-source Linux source code, said Jeff
Norman, an intellectual property partner with a Chicago law
firm.
"We're talking about open-source code. The code is out there,"
he said. "For them to say that they can't respond to IBM's request
to identify specific items of code they are infringing, I just
don't understand that. I don't think the judge is going to
understand that."
"Either they know that there's code that's infringing or they're
just fishing," he said.
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service