SCO loss to IBM closes another pulp fiction chapter

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 04 July 2006 10:49

Your IT - Home IT

The long drawn out saga, which essentially is the SCO Group's battle with the Linux world at large, but which since 2003 has been focussed on IBM, took one step closer yesterday to being confined to the litigious junk heap that the US technology legal system has become.

To put things in their perspective, there are still 112 claims outstanding that SCO has against IBM but another 182 claims were dismissed by a Utah District Court magistrate.

The claims hinge upon a rift between IBM and SCO emanating out of a collaborative venture in 1998 called Project Monterey. SCO and IBM, with the support of Intel were to develop a Unix port for the Intel 64-bit Itanium system.

However, the collaboration fell apart and in 2000 IBM began to support Linux development. Three years later, SCO launched a US$5 billion legal action against IBM claiming that Unix code owned by SCO was illegally used by IBM in its contribution to Linux development. Needless to say, as IBM's contribution to the Linux development effort has been considerable, all Linux distributions could conceivably be affected. To date, however, SCO has yet to point to a single line of code that IBM has allegedly misappropriated.

While there are still another 112 claims that SCO can pursue and, if it wished, it could appeal against the dismissal of the 182 claims yesterday, SCO, unlike IBM, is running out of cash fast. With the massive movement that Open Source software development has become and, with the notable exception of Microsoft, the weight of a vast body of major IT vendors behind Linux, the prospect of SCO gaining a settlement from IBM is remote. The prospect of gaining a share of the intellectual property rights to Linux distributions is even more remote.