SCO evidence tossed, again

SCO is having a tough time making its Microsoft-funded, evidence-free claims against IBM and Linux stick. Judge Dale Kimball has reaffirmed the original June order of Judge Brooke Wells that tossed out most of SCO's evidence.

In his ruling, he found "that SCO failed to comply with the court's previous discovery-related Orders and Rule 26(e), that SCO acted wilfully, that SCO's conduct has resulted in prejudice to IBM, and that this result - the inability of SCO to use the evidence at issue to prove its claims - should come as no surprise to SCO."

Judge Wells originally ordered SCO to show what evidence it had in June. SCO's objected to the order and after an October session of oral arguments, Judge Kimball confirmed the ruling last week. The Utah-based company originally claimed in 2003 that it owned Unix, that IBM had copied millions of lines of its Unix code into Linux and had violated contractual agreements.

In his ruling, Judge Kimball also said that Novell's current litigation against SCO for claiming ownership of Unix code should go ahead before the IBM case. SCO claimed the right to terminate IBM's licence to distribute Sequent and Dynix because it said it was the copyright holder.

Novell subsequently sued SCO saying that Novell - and not SCO - was the current copyright holder. In a Motion for Partial Summary Judgement, Novell "asks the Court to declare that Novell has the authority ... to take the following actions: (1) to direct The SCO Group to waive its purported claims against IBM under the SVRX licence agreements between IBM Corporation and AT&T and between Sequent Computer Systems and AT&T, and (2) because SCO refused (and still refuses) to follow that direction, to waive those claims on SCO's behalf."

The head of the Samba team, which writes a popular open source tool for accessing Windows networks, has said his project will adopt the new version of the GNU General Public Licence as soon as it becomes available.

Andrew Tridgell said the licence ensures that the "chain of rights" between user and developer is not diluted in any way.

Version 3 of the GPL has been criticised by some kernel contributors but it has received a fresh boost, in principle at least, after Novell and Microsoft signed an agreement which deliberately worked around the patent protection implicit in version 2.

Thanks to Groklaw, Pacer and LinuxWorld Australia.