SCO, IBM battle heats up

CNet News ^ | 11/12/03 | Declan McCullagh

[Salo]

SCO, IBM battle heats up By Declan McCullagh CNET News.com

November 12, 2003, 12:04 PM PT

Subpoenas are flying in the high-profile lawsuit between the SCO Group and IBM, as both companies try to buttress their legal claims by turning to third parties for information.

SCO said Wednesday that it has filed subpoenas with the U.S. District Court in Utah, targeting six different individuals or organizations. Those include Novell; Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation; Stewart Cohen, chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs; and John Horsley, general counsel of Transmeta.

SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said he did not know what the subpoenas asked for, but "I know that some of them have been served."

IBM has also broadened its efforts to respond to the Linux-related lawsuit by asking a federal judge to order SCO to identify illegal source code and serving four other companies with subpoenas of its own.

SCO filed the suit in March, claiming that IBM "contaminated" Linux by illegally incorporating trade secrets inherited from Unix. So far, SCO has listed the names of 591 files in the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels that allegedly contain illicit code but has not been more specific.

IBM's subpoenas were sent Oct. 30 to BayStar Capital, Deutsche Bank Group, Renaissance Ventures and The Yankee Group, which have indicated they have reason to believe that SCO's claims are legitimate. IBM has cited an Oct. 16 article in The Salt Lake Tribune that reported that Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Skiba visited SCO's headquarters and saw a "near exact duplicate of source code between the Linux 2.4 kernel and (SCO's) Unix System V kernel." In October, BayStar Capital invested $50 million in SCO.

In a statement to CNET News.com on Wednesday, IBM said: "It is time for SCO to produce something meaningful. They have been dragging their feet, and it is not clear there is any incentive for SCO to try this in court." IBM filed motions on Nov. 3 and Nov. 6, asking the court to "issue an order compelling SCO to respond to IBM's interrogatories with specificity and in detail."

SCO's Stowell said his company provided about a million pages of documents in response to IBM's requests. "They are trying to coerce and intimidate," Stowell said, referring to Big Blue's subpoenas. "I think what they're trying to do is that if you're a potential investor in our company or an industry analyst that says anything even remotely favorable toward SCO, you're going to be subpoenaed by IBM."

[Salo]

More grist for the mill.

[Salo]

It sounds like suicide to me.

[Dominic Harr]

This just in, SCO has issued subpoenas for "Yo Momma" and "The Horse You Rode In On".

And to drag this out even further, they plan to subpoena every single Linux developer!

[John Locke]

A little context:

May 2003 - SCO Chief Executive Darl McBride says SCO has enough revenue and cash on hand to fund its current plans, and is refusing new investment.

July 2003: SCO's available cash on hand drops to $11 million, with over $140 million outflow in the past 18 months.

September 2003: SCO borrows to make payroll.

October 2003: Reversing its stance in May, SCO accepts an investment of $50 million from BayStar in exchange for 17% of the company. BayStar's number one investor is Microsoft, and number two investor is Vulcan Ventures, owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

November 2003: SCO escalates their lawsuit against IBM and Linux. Nobody is surprised.

[Salo]

That's very interesting: especially the part about borrowing to make payroll. I guess lawyers are expensive. ;-)

[ShadowAce]

My opinion of this is that SCO decided to make a very public spectacle of its suicide. That is the whole purpose behind its lawsuit against IBM. Another (possible) reason for the lawsuit could be merely money laundering--an attempt to rid its books of invester money so corporate officers could escape with the big bucks.

DISCLAIMER: I have no inside information, nor am I a legal expert, so pay heed to these opinions in direct proportion that you paid for them.

[Nick Danger]

Watching this nonsense unfold in the press has been a very eye-opening experience for me. I had no idea that the trade press was into taking sides in these things the way the regular news media sides with Democrats all the time.

To read this, SCO is once again the Company On The March, letting the subpoenas fly as it aggressively pursues its mighty lawsuit against IBM. It isn't until the fourth paragraph that we find out that IBM has "issued subpoenas of its own."

Wait a minute. What happened here is that back on October 30, IBM served subpoenas on a bunch of analysts and investment types who had publicly claimed to have seen this "evidence" which SCO says it has... but which SCO refuses to produce in court as the law requires.

That just quietly went on the court docket, where most people never saw it, until a Forbes reporter wrote a story about the IBM subpoenas.

Two days later, we have the Ziff-Davis pubs breathlessly announcing the Big News that SCO has served subpoenas. The subpoenas are so new that they don't appear on the court docket, and at least one of them (Linus Torvalds') was served last night during dinner. So the SCO subpoenas are quite obviously a stunt created in response to the Forbes story.

Watching Ziff-Davis (CNet, ZDNet, some others) cover this is like watching CNN cover Clinton. On ZDNet, everything SCO does is is amazing and newsworthy, and all their critics are jerks. You'd never know by reading ZD that SCO is about to have its case dismissed because they can't say, except in arm-waving general terms, what it's about.

[Golden Eagle]

And to drag this out even further, they plan to subpoena every single Linux developer!

Got any proof of that? Or just paranoid rambling delusions of a linux fanatic?

[Golden Eagle]

September 2003: SCO borrows to make payroll.

Funny how your lone post on FR is the only place on earth reporting this. Or do you have a source?

BayStar's number one investor is Microsoft...

Again, got any proof of your claims? Or just more exaggerations and falsehoods so common from the linux crowd?

[Golden Eagle]

You'd never know by reading ZD that SCO is about to have its case dismissed

Is this whole thread nothing more than incorrect statements posted as fact, or do you any substantiated proof the SCO case is anywhere near being dismissed? Looks to me like you are just making things up as you go, product of your environment apparently.

[Golden Eagle]

Well it should surprise no one that SCO called Torvalds and Stallman since they are directly related to Linux and the GPL, but IBM calling trade analysts and other loosely related parties is a joke. Talk about a fishing expedition! No matter what they may find it's not going to distract from the basis of the actual court case - that IBM likely took Unix technology and illegally transferred it into a competing product.

[Golden Eagle]

Here's something for you Linux Lovers to get all excited about - Barney Frank is the new Linux posterboy!

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=85666&cid=7460723

Not surprising since all the dim presidential candidates are running their websites on it, while GWB is running on proprietary American technology.

[Salo]

Actually, if this is a contract dispute between IBM and SCO, calling in Stallman and Torvalds, who are not parties to this contract, is stupid. If your real goal is to generate publicity to revive your falling stock price, this move makes sense. Stallman is always good for a few headlines as he is a loose cannon.

[Salo]

That's *Chinese* technology now, remember? ;-) Oh yeah, welcome back, Darl. :-)

GWB is running on proprietary American technology

[Salo]

FYI, Sharpton runs on Solaris.

[Golden Eagle]

Torvalds and Stallman are extremely relevant to the code indoctrination process and the purpose of the GPL. It won't take much of a lawyer to get Torvalds to admit he makes no check of IP ownership before releasing the code to infinite copies, or for Stallman to admit he devised the GPL so that all software could be free. And with that SCO will have shown is was very easy and very likely for their Unix code and concepts to have been duplicated infinite times with zero revenue back to them. They are IBM's accomplices #1 and #2.

[Golden Eagle]

FYI, Sharpton runs on Solaris.

Good. He's just not a socialist as much as the rest of em I guess.

[Golden Eagle]

That's *Chinese* technology now, remember?

Bad joke. Everybody knows Red Flag Rinux I mean Linux is from China. And the red commies will keep pumping more and more money into it until it becomes the #1 linux product in the world.

[Salo]

Who owns the windows source? Remember the thread? Don't make me link it. ;-)

Bad joke.

[ShadowAce]

And the red commies will keep pumping more and more money into it until it becomes the #1 linux product in the world.

I thought your beef with Linux was that Linux users aren't concerned with money. So it follows that more money into a Linux product does not necessarily produce a large distro. Look at Red Hat for an example. Debian is one of the least financed distros, yet it runs on more archectures than any other OS in existance.

Try a different tack in your argument and you may actually get someone to listen.