The SCO vs IBM lawsuit has been reopened after US Judge David Nuffer granted SCO’s motion for reconsideration. Hon. Nuffer noted that he is new to the case and will require all the parties involved to supply him with sufficient details to mull over. SCO sued IBM in 2003 for violating its intellectual property after exposing critical code that placed Linux ahead of SCO’s own UnixWare. According to this claim, “IBM interfered with SCO’s position as the leader in the UNIX-on-Intel market by wrongfully disclosing confidential UNIX technologies to Linux, in order to transform Linux from an upstart operating system for hobbyists to a commercial-grade alternative to SCO’s UnixWare and OpenServer operating systems.”
Judge Dale Kimball, who had presided over the SCO vs IBM case in 2005, noted that: “Viewed against the backdrop of SCO’s plethora of public statements concerning IBM’s and others’ infringement of SCO’s purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO’s alleged copyrights through IBM’s Linux activities.” Despite SCO’s claims, MIT’s Dr. Randall Davis provided an extensive review on the IBM Code finding no portion of source code that beared similarity to Unix System V.
SCO filed a motion for reconsideration in May 2013 which was granted on the 14th of this month. The company’s legal team is expected to make a brief on foreclosed claims from the SCO vs Novell judgement. Summary judgement motions filed during the time of SCO bankruptcy will not be decided upon unless SCO briefs the court on more details concerning these motions.
If SCO achieves some form of success with the lawsuit, then it can prove that it owns a piece of Unix, and Linux, and Android. Already Android runs on quite a few devices, so SCO may go after Google, who have taken charge of the mobile OS not to mention Red Hat and all the other Unix-based systems.
via Groklaw
