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Judge to SCO: cough up the code

Posted 12/07/2003 @ 11:17 PM
by Eric Bangeman

In an important development in the ongoing court battles involving SCO, a Utah judge has given SCO 30 days to produce the exact Linux code it claims violates its Unix ownership rights. Further discovery in the lawsuit pitting SCO against IBM has been halted until SCO specifically identifies the code in question. While SCO claims to have shown nearly one million lines of code in the course of pursuing its claims against Linux vendors, their efforts thus far at clearly demonstrating the exact nature of the alleged infringements have not impressed many.

"SCO has oscillated back and forth between vague claims relating to copyrights, vague claims relating to trade secrets and contract violations but whenever anyone tries to pin them to a specific cause of action, they say they can't talk about that, they just say IBM has to tell them everything they did first," says Eric S. Raymond, president of the non-profit open source advocate group Open Source Initiative. "Nothing so far stands up under five minutes of scrutiny."

Now the burden of proof falls upon SCO. Will their claims stand up once the up-to-now super-secret code is revealed? Or could this mark the beginning of the end to their current business strategy of suing every Linux vendor in sight. Tune in after 30 days . . .

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