SCO in an email mess with their lawsuit against IBM

SCO in an email mess with their lawsuit against IBM

SCO is losing its fans on a daily basis it seems like. The latest story is about an email sent by a former employee to SCO employee Reg Broughton, who then forwarded it to SCO CEO Darl McBride. The mail indicated the company’s investigation found that Linux does not infringe on SCO’s intellectual property. This email by Michael Davidson was posted on the Pamela Jones Groklaw Web site recently.

SCO had recently sued IBM for allegedly using SCO’s Unix code in the Linux kernel. This mail certainly makes the case interesting. It details a comparison made between the then-current version of Linux and versions of AT&T’s Unix source code that SCO held. Bob Swartz, an outside consultant hired by SCO, conducted the research. It goes something like this:

“At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever,” Davidson wrote in his e-mail. “There is, indeed, a lot of code that is common between UNIX and Linux (all of the X Windows system, for example) but invariably it turned out that the common code was something that both we (SCO) and the Linux community had obtained (legitimately) from some third party.”

Sun had to today release a clarification on the furor it has raised in the market. They also released a PDF file containing the memo sent by Swartz to SCO employee Steve Sabbath dated Oct. 4, 1999. The statement from the company said: “This memo shows that Mr. Davidson’s e-mail is referring to an investigation limited to literal copying, which is not the standard for copyright violations, and which can be avoided by deliberate obfuscation, as the memo itself points out. Even more importantly, this memo shows that there are problems with Linux.”

The company claims that the memo says that additional research would be required to locate all of the problems.