SCO's refusal to produce details on what code violates its intellectual property has prompted a Utah judge to dismiss the bulk of its legal complaints.

The ruling doesn't wrap up the legal case, but it provides the most convincing evidence yet that SCO's case lacks any foundation.

In summary, SCO claims to own the intellectual copyrights for Unix, and alleges that IBM illegally copied parts of its code to the Linux kernel. IBM in response asked SCO to tell them what code they believe is in violation, and the judge ordered SCO to do so.

03 Jul 2006

SCO essentially said: we don't know exactly, but IBM does because they committed the theft. Which makes the case no different than me accusing a homeless person of stealing my remote control just because I can't find it.

SCO failed to comply with the court order and the judge in response threw out the majority of the claims against IBM.

Why did SCO launch a legal campaign if it can't produce the evidence to back up its legal claims?

The logical conclusion would be that SCO was merely trying to scare IBM into settling the law suit.

But I wouldn't rule out that SCO actually planned this move in an effort to control its legal bill.

Facing a steady decline in its Unix business and mounting legal bills, SCO in September 2004 capped its legal costs. Essentially it paid its law firm a flat fee and a percentage of the sum that it will be rewarded in damages (if any), in exchange for the firm's continued legal services.

That may sound great from a financial point of view, but practically SCO is likely to get stuck with the law firm's interns while the capable lawyers will focus on more profitable clients.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that SCO has a rightful claim. Identifying and pinpointing the exact code in several versions of AIX and Linux that is stolen from Unix will take an enormous amount of time. It makes more sense to identify a few areas where SCO can more easily proof its case and win a small victory against IBM.

The legal case against IBM might bring in large sums of money in damages, but the actual legal victory would be the real jackpot. If any of SCO's intellectual property ended up in the Linux software, every user and distributor will have to pay up. Then we're talking thousands of companies who could be forced to pay annual licence fees.

If I were SCO, I would go for the low hanging fruit at this point. Then the judge just did me a pretty big favour by making the case a lot smaller and easy to manage.

But in the end SCO still has to proof that any crimes were committed against the Unix vendor.