A Utah judge ruled Friday that SCO Group will be required to show within 30 days the Linux code it claims infringes on Unix ownership rights granted through a prior technology acquisition.
The ruling was seen as a boost to open source advocates who feel SCO has been dragging its heels and looking for a settlement of its claims. The court granted two IBM motions, requiring SCO to comply with specificity and also suspended further discovery, according to interrogatory filings posted at open source advocacy weblog groklaw.net, which tracks the SCO case.
SCO has stated that the documents requested by the court are the System V source code, the license agreements, and the Linux 2.4 kernel, but interrogatories filed during discovery indicate the burden of proof is on SCO. "SCO should be required immediately to identify -- by product, file and line of code -- all of the alleged trade secrets and any confidential or proprietary information that SCO alleges or contends IBM misappropriated or misused. There is no reason it cannot, and should not be required to, do this," reads an addendum to IBM's counter-claim, Civil No. 2:03cv0294.
In a November 17 keynote at CDXPO, SCO Group CEO Darl McBride said SCO has been showing code in question, though certain portions are under confidentiality agreements. "We've shown nearly a million lines of code that relate to contracts that we have, we haven't heard any comments back on that."
SCO's evidence so far has not been to the satisfaction of the judge or other observers. "SCO has oscillated back and forth between vague claims relating to copyrights, vague claims relating to trade secrets and contract violations but whenever anyone tries to pin them to a specific cause of action, they say they can't talk about that, they just say IBM has to tell them everything they did first," says Eric S. Raymond, president of the non-profit open source advocate group Open Source Initiative. "Nothing so far stands up under five minutes of scrutiny."
Is the case a benchmark that portends trouble for the proprietary software industry? On a broader note, McBride compared the "free is good" software attitude to the history of Napster versus the success of Microsoft, and contends that the undoing of its Unix code rights will begin a slippery slope of reversals that could put an end to the proprietary software industry, which he gauged at $229 billion in 2007. "The question is what is the price of free?" McBride said. At the same time he says IBM has profited billions of dollars in hardware, software and services by bundling the open source operating system in its products.
There is a kernel of truth in that statement, agrees Raymond. "He's right that the open source movement is a threat to a number of proprietary companies. Where he's wrong is in believing he has a right to continue to profit by that business model when the rest of the economy has decided it wants to do something else." All similarities between Unix and Linux are entirely a matter of permissible reverse engineering from public technical standards, he says.
With few exceptions, software companies are happy to see developers collaborate, and don't make most of their money from the fact their software is proprietary anyway, Raymond says. "It makes more money to collaborate and offer services than it does to try to hold onto the code as proprietary IP. That's happening all over, and in that sense you could say SCO's model is obsolete."
