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"SCO has not complied, your honor," Marriott declared. "They have not provided all the documents requested. . . . We want to know the location of the 17 lines of code [SCO has thus far provided to IBM]. We want to know, exactly, what it is in Linux they believe they have rights to."

This is either a misquote, or a mis-statement by IBM's attorney. It should be 17 files. I believe the 17 files in question contain about 3700 lines of code -- substantially less than the "million(s?) of lines of code" claimed by McBride as recently as his speech at Harvard (and was quoted in court by IBM).

17 lines of code wouldn't constitute a substantial infringement, and certainly not worth $5 billion.

justlurking wrote:
This is either a misquote, or a mis-statement by IBM's attorney. It should be 17 files. I believe the 17 files in question contain about 3700 lines of code -- substantially less than the "million(s?) of lines of code" claimed by McBride as recently as his speech at Harvard (and was quoted in court by IBM).
taxcontrol wrote:
What I noticed was that the claim has dropped from "millions of lines of code" down to 17. Further, they can show the 17. Makes you go, Hmmmmmm.

I don't know what was in SCO's answers to the interrogatories in response to the December order from the judge. I suspect it was more than 17 lines, but I don't know exactly how much more.

SCO has filed a Second ammended complaint which includes reference to some code that they allege is misappropriated. In that complaint they reference about 26 separate sections of code, totalling several hundred lines that they allege some (still unspecified) rights to.

This article either has a misquote about that, or the IBM guy misspoke, or possibly the 17 line figure might refer to lines that SCO has identified as infringements and to which SCO has explained the nature of their rights. Since the actual replies to the interrogatories are probably covered by a gag order of some kind, we may never know exactly what their answer contained.

This is either a misquote, or a mis-statement by IBM's attorney. It should be 17 files.

It's a deliberate subterfuge by IBM.

I believe the 17 files in question contain about 3700 lines of code -- substantially less than the "million(s?) of lines of code" claimed by McBride as recently as his speech at Harvard (and was quoted in court by IBM). 17 lines of code wouldn't constitute a substantial infringement, and certainly not worth $5 billion.

Try thinking: The "17 files" that SCO cited are only a small part of the infringing set of files. SCO knows that IBM contributed a helluva lot more code than that. What is IBM so afraid of? Why not disclose its contributions if it had a right to make them? Answer: IBM is going to try and stall this as long as it can.