The decision is just the latest in a long line of setbacks for
SCO, which is claiming that IBM put some material from the Unix
operating system into the open source Linux system. SCO owns some
intellectual property rights in Unix and is suing for copyright
infringement.
SCO is claiming damages that it has said could reach $5 billion
in its case against IBM. IBM denies SCO's claims and recent rulings
in the complicated case have gone IBM's way.
Last summer Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells limited SCO's claims,
throwing out 187 of the 294 items on an SCO list of materials
misused by IBM. Wells said that the company had not provided
sufficient evidence to back its claims, and the decision was
subsequently backed by Judge Dale Kimball in a Utah District
Court.
Wells has now ruled that SCO's motion claiming 'IBM's spoliation
of evidence' is denied. SCO had argued that an IBM email ordered
programmers to destroy software code, and that IBM had relied on
software that belonged to it in developing its system.
According to Groklaw, which has been following the entire case,
Mark James for SCO said that he accepted that there was in fact not
destruction of code but of evidence of programmers' reliance on
software which itself contained some SCO-owned Unix code in its
development of Linux.
IBM said that it had not destroyed any code, nor any records of
what code was used in the development of Linux. In fact, it said,
it had provided exactly that information to SCO. It was contained
within a configuration management and version control (CMVC)
machine which IBM provided to SCO during discovery.
IBM's lawyer said that a huge amount of time and effort had been
expended on putting together that system and providing it to SCO in
the discovery part of the trial, but that it appeared that SCO had
not even used it, said Groklaw.
SCO then asked the judge to make IBM tell it whereabouts in the
massive CMVC machine the relevant information was. IBM said it was
reluctant to do so, but Wells asked it to reconsider in the spirit
of co-operation.
