Potentially buried in today's announcement of lawsuits filed by SCO against DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone were some significant developments in the ongoing SCO vs. IBM court battle. The lawsuit had been bogged down in discovery, and back in December, the presiding judge gave SCO 30 days to produce the particular Linux code it claims is in violation of their copyrights. Becoming fed-up with the lack of progress in the case, the judge has now ordered SCO fully comply with IBM's discovery demands within 45 days. This means that SCO needs to cough it up:
SCO has 45 days to identify "all specific lines of code" they allege IBM put into Linux from AIX or Dynix; identify and provide "with specificity all lines of code in Linux that it claims rights to; provide and identify with specificity the lines of code that SCO distributed to other parties, and this is to include "where applicable the conditions of release, to whom the code was released, the date and under what circumstances such code was released."
For its part, IBM has the same amount of time to provide some of the information requested by the SCO: "the releases of AIX and Dynix consisting of 'about 232 products' as was represented by Mr. Marriott at the February 6, 2004 hearing." Essentially, the judge is rejecting SCO's argument that they need IBM to first fork over AIX and Dynix in order to answer IBM's request. Instead, the two litigants will have to work in tandem to satisfy one another's discovery requests.
