SCOX suffers another setback in its case against IBM:
New Blow To SCO
Daniel Lyons, 01.19.07, 10:15 AM ET
SCO Group has suffered another setback in its lawsuit against IBM over the Linux operating system on Thursday, as a judge tossed out SCO's motion alleging that International Business Machines destroyed crucial evidence in the case.
SCO (nasdaq: SCOX - news - people ) first mentioned the "spoliation" allegation in a filing last summer. In September, SCO made the claim official, when it filed a motion. The move looked like a kind of Hail Mary pass in a case that appears to be growing ever more desperate for SCO.
SCO, of Lindon, Utah, sued IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) in March 2003, claiming that IBM took code from Unix, for which SCO claims to hold some copyrights, and put it into Linux, a similar operating system that is distributed at no cost.
The case has angered fans of Linux. If SCO were to prevail, this could cause problems not only for IBM but for Linux distributors like Novell (nasdaq: NOVL - news - people ) and Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT - news - people ), as well as Hewlett-Packard (nyse: HPQ - news - people ), which has built a booming business around Linux. It's also good news for thousands of companies worldwide, including Web titans Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ) and Amazon (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ), which use Linux in their data centers.
The case has not gone well for SCO. Earlier this year, Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells of the U.S. District Court in Utah tossed out two-thirds of SCO's claims against IBM because SCO had refused, after repeated requests, to provide specific details about which lines of code allegedly were stolen.
Brent Hatch, an attorney who represents SCO, told Forbes last summer that one reason SCO had been unable to produce that evidence was that IBM had instructed its programmers to destroy code after SCO filed its lawsuit.
On Thursday, however, Judge Wells denied SCO's motion, claiming that any code that once existed on IBM programmers' machines should still be available in a code management database that IBM maintained.
The judge did, however, rule in favor of SCO on another issue, when she denied an IBM motion seeking to obtain financial records of one of SCO's expert witnesses.
A SCO spokesman declined to comment. IBM would not comment beyond stating, "We prefer to let the judge's ruling speak for itself."
The case is scheduled for trial in 2008. But first, a related case, SCO v. Novell, will have to be decided.
At stake in that action is whether SCO even owns the copyrights it claims IBM has infringed upon. Novell argues that it owns the copyrights to Unix, and that SCO does not.
If SCO loses its case against Novell, its case against IBM may fall apart completely.
The Novell case is scheduled for trial in September.
us.rd.yahoo.com*http://www.forbes.com/2007/01/19/sco-ibm-linux-tech-cz_dl_0119sco.html?partner=yahootix |
