Judge weakens SCO case

A US court order granting in part IBM’s motion to limit SCO’s claims against IBM over Linux and intellectual property is being widely interpreted as a heavy blow to the Unix and Linux developer and distributor’s long-running case.

Judge Brooke Wells lambasted SCO’s failure to back up its arguments and dismissed about two-thirds of its claims that IBM had inserted Unix code into Linux.

“SCO’s arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM, ‘Sorry, we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know,’” Wells said. “Certainly, if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus, they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd [to tell] the accused, ‘You know what you stole, I’m not telling’.”

However, experts said that it is still important to monitor for code infringements, due to the increasing importance of community-developed software and component-based IT architectures that let third-party code interact with internal systems.

Doug Levin, head of Black Duck Software, which automates compliance, said worries about being sued was not the primary motivator for his customers.

“It’s really not the fear factor,” Levin said. “It’s part of the development process. We are in the business of accelerating the adoption of open-source software and there are multi- ple storms happening.”

Levin argued that customers are affected by the “rocket growth” they are seeing in open-source, outsourcing and corporate governance. “There’s a lot of hybrid code – and hybrid is where the world is going to be. They have obligations to sort through all this and make sure it’s legitimate,” he added.