IBM Eye

SCO Group today filed for bankruptcy protection. With less than $10m cash left to call on, SCO said that Chapter 11 protection and reorganization would protect assets as it addresses, ahem, “potential financial and legal challenges”.

I love it!

Infomation Week has an article this week claiming, among other things, that IBM provides sponsorship for the the nonprofit that freely hosts Groklaw, a fine legal repository famous for its anti SCO slant.

Per the article:

Groklaw, a widely read Web site that has sided with IBM in its legal battle with The SCO Group, receives free hosting from an academic research project that is in part funded by IBM, according to the project’s director.

Paul Jones, director of the University of North Carolina’s ibiblio project, confirmed in an interview that ibiblio provides free Web hosting services to Groklaw and that ibiblio is funded in part by grants from IBM as well as several other tech companies with a strong interest in the promotion of the Linux operating system.

“We have some sponsorship from IBM, although they’re not our largest sponsor,” said Jones.

Jones said he was unable to say exactly how much funding ibiblio receives from IBM. Inquiries to IBM on the matter weren’t immediately answered.

Groklaw for years has been a thorn in the side of The SCO Group, which sued IBM in 2003 claiming that IBM’s contributions to the Linux operating system contain computer code purloined from SCO. Since then, Groklaw has become an online repository of case documents and fierce anti-SCO editorializing by the site’s editors — including chief blogger Pamela Jones, who is not related to Paul Jones.

IBM gave a swift and concise response, saying essentially “you people are smoking crack”.

IBM has no connection to the editorial content posted on Groklaw.

Groklaw’s website, and hundreds of others, are hosted on a website at the University of North Carolina (UNC), called ibliblio. This site is described by UNC as a public library. ibiblio runs on IBM System x servers which were funded through an IBM Shared University Award Grant awarded to UNC — a grant that predates Groklaw ever being hosted on ibiblio. Anyone can host a site there and IBM does not sponsor, nor endorse, the content of those sites.

IBM is proud to sponsor many universities around the world in various ways, including helping them host websites like the one at UNC.

IBM is suing Amazon over its alleged abuse of IBM ecommerce and customer customization technologies. The court filings are not yet public anywhere that I can find (on the ridiculous Texas Eastern District Website), but the patents allegedly violated are:

• US 5,796,967 - Presenting Applications in an Interactive Service.
• US 5,442,771 - Storing Data in an Interactive Network.
• US 7,072,849 - Presenting Advertising in an Interactive Service.
• US 5,446,891 - Adjusting Hypertext Links with Weighted User Goals and Activities.
• US 5,319,542 - Ordering Items Using an Electronic Catalogue.

The most thorough article that I could find summarizing the implications is at BusinessWeek:

IBM seems to have come down on both sides of this issue. In December, the company filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case of Laboratory Corp. of America Holdings v. Metabolite Laboratories, arguing that method patents have been overdone, and acknowledging that some of its own business-method patents may be invalid. “I will be looking to see if IBM has had a change of heart since last December,” says attorney James W. Dabney, partner at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP.

From Monsters and Critics:

‘We filed this case for a very simple reason. IBM`s property is being knowingly and unfairly exploited,’ said Dr. John E. Kelly III, senior vice president of IBM Technology and Intellectual Property. ‘IBM is one of the world`s leading creators of intellectual property and one of the most progressive in embracing new, highly collaborative ways of driving and managing innovation.

I’ll post more when I can either read the briefs or summarize a lawyer who has. My initial reaction is similar to that or The Register:

Mercifully, a quick search of the United States Patent and Trademark Office revealed that IBM does not appear to hold a patent on the entire concept of ecommerce.

Another PR strike against the kindly open source giant.

UPDATE 11/8/2006

This article has a great line about the case:

In the Amazon case, the stakes are high. IBM’s patents include “storing data in an interactive network,” “ordering items using an electronic catalogue” and “presenting advertising in an interactive service”. These could be considered fundamental to e-commerce on the web. If the patents stand up, it could let IBM impose what amounts to a tax on online shopping.

Groklaw has a great article about the news in the SCO vs. IBM case. In short, IBM asked the judge to throw out SCO Group’s breach-of-contract and copyright case on the grounds that SCO “has failed to identify any code allegedly owned by SCO and copied by IBM into Linux” (The Judge already stated as much) and that IBM had been encouraged to do as it wished with the source code by AT&T.

“What does that mean? That if IBM were to prevail on all its motions (of course that is a rare event indeed) then the only thing left to bring to a jury would be IBM’s counterclaims. That has to be SCO’s worst nightmare. That would mean the only questions for the jury to decide, if they found for IBM on the rest of IBM’s counterclaims, would be how bad was SCO and how much do they owe IBM?”

Another quote I enjoyed from the comments on the groklaw site (which I’m more and more impressed with each time I visit):

So THIS was what SCO’s spoliation of evidence claim amounted to. All that fuss they made in the press, and they use it to ask the judge to sanction IBM by umm, inferring that errr, IBM looked at AIX/Dynix source code when contributing to Linux?

This heinous act of evidence spoliation by IBM has really advanced SCO’s case by allowing the court to infer what IBM already admitted years ago.

In fact, IBM should file a memorandum to oppose this on the grounds that IBM didn’t just look at AIX source code, it put great flaming gobs of AIX source code in Linux. And it’s PROUD of it, and the court should jolly well infer that instead!

There has been a lot going on in the IBM world the past few months that we’ve been down.  I wanted to summarize broader things if only becasue they’ve hit my radar. As a quick overview of some things that caught my eye: