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!

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