The SCO Debacle

Back in 2003, SCO Group (holder of certain IP rights in the Unix operating system) sued IBM for more than $1 billion, claiming that IBM by having a Linux product had misappropriated SCO's Unix.

But SCO has never produced any real evidence that, in fact, its copyrights have been infringed.  The litigation has been plowing on and on, and a trial is scheduled for some time in 2007.

Now the estimable Pamela Jones, author of Groklaw, has obtained an August 2002 internal SCO email that makes it clear that SCO commissioned an extensive external audit that revealed ”no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.” 

The SCO suit has made many people worry about the future of open source.  It was, from the beginning, a business model masquerading as a lawsuit — SCO really has nothing to offer other than litigation threats.  Now it's even clearer than it was before (and it was pretty clear before) that the copyright portions of the lawsuit were based on less than nothing.

As Pam Jones put it yesterday, “If this doesn't make your blood boil, see your doctor right away.”

July 15, 2005 | Filed Under main page 

Comments

3 Responses to “The SCO Debacle”

  1. Anonymous on July 15th, 2005 1:27 pm

    I'm confused (which is pretty easy to do), is SCO claiming they copyrighted the funtional concepts in the SCO Unix?
    From Slashdot.org
    “The SCO Group has slammed as 'inaccurate' suggestions that an e-mail from one of its own engineers showed Linux did not contain copyright Unix code, and even forwarded its own historical memo to journalists in an attempt to discredit the e-mail published on Groklaw.” From the article: “This memo shows that Mr. Davidson's e-mail is referring to an investigation limited to literal copying, which is not the standard for copyright violations, and which can be avoided by deliberate obfuscation, as the memo itself points out…”
    http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/0,2000061733,39202609,00.htm

  2. Anonymous on July 15th, 2005 3:05 pm

    Well, the standard is substantial similarity, which means there doesn't have to be literal copying. So they're not necessarily claiming that they own copyright rights in Linux functions.
    But I'm not sure that matters. If you look at the Davidson email quoted on Groklaw, it's pretty clear that he thought even any similar code in Linux came from third parties — not Unix. SCO is trying to muddy things up, but the email is pretty damning.

  3. Anonymous on July 17th, 2005 9:48 pm

    The SCO Group has consistently claimed ‘infringement’. At a December 2003 hearing, The SCO Group's attorney Kevin McBride told the court:

    This case, Your Honor, at a very fundamental level, involves infringement.
    Infringement is a very broadly defined category in the law. It can include
    copyright infringement, trade secrets infringement or plain old confidential
    information that's taken without permission. Those are all very differently
    defined areas of the law that all have very differently defined rules of
    proof. […]
    There's going to be some of this code and some of these methods that are
    trade secrets, and some are going to be copyright and some are going to be
    contract violations and some are going to be nothing.

    Over a year later, in Judge Kimball's February 2005 Memorandum Decision and Order, the court found:

    Viewed against the backdrop of SCO's plethora of public statements concerning IBM's and others' infringement of SCO's purported copyrights to the UNIX software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO's alleged copyrights through IBM's Linux activities. Further, SCO, in its briefing, chose to cavalierly ignore IBM's claims that SCO could not create a disputed fact regarding whether it even owned the relevant copyrights.

    Does that help to answer your question?

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