Rule 0x0B

Elf Sternberg tells us the good news about the lawsuit filed by SCO against IBM claiming that IBM's use and distribution of Linux violates SCO's intellectual property rights in System V UNIX.

At a hearing last Friday, the presiding judge granted IBM's first and second motions to compel discovery, giving SCO thirty days to comply, and suspending all other discovery until the hearing next month. IBM is demanding that SCO identify precisely what source code for the Linux kernel is derived from System V. SCO has claimed in public statements that it knows what source code is affected, but it doesn't want to dilute its IP by revealing it. Well, the judge has just told them to put up or shut up.

According to an an observer at the hearing:

There are no offending "trade secrets" from SysV in the IBM case. However: "Trade Secrets" were stolen from Unixware during Monterey and wholesale given to Linux. "Confidential Information" was stolen from derivitive works of SysV specifically Dynix, specifically NUMA and RCU. IBM owns derivitive works but must "use" them as specified by license, namely, treated as part of the original software and kept "confidential". IBM owns derivitive works but cannot step outside of the scope of the license agreement. All of their outrageous public statements, in their entirety, (which the judge ripped them for) had nothing to do with IBM and were all related to SGI and that SGI has acknowledged in some degree.

Elf Sternberg says of the SGI IP leakage, This IP, it should be noted, was never put into production as Linus [Torvalds] deemed it irredeemably ugly and replaced it with something more elegant and independently produced.

Observers of the case report that IBM is beginning to make pointed hints about Rule Eleven. One wonders what has been taking them so long.