IBM has also issued a subpoena to Intel Corp, which could potentially prove critical to the court’s understanding of Project Monterey, the agreement between IBM and SCO that lies at the heart of the case.
The January 18 court order was celebrated by SCO supporters as a small but significant victory as it attempts to prove its claims that IBM breached a contract with Lindon, Utah-based SCO by contributing Unix code to Linux.
The terms of the order compelled IBM to hand over to SCO all versions of its AIX and Dynix Unix variants, as well as all changes to them, estimated by IBM to be in the region of two billion lines of code.
The company was also ordered by Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells to provide SCO with programmer’s notes, design documents, white papers and the comments and notes of the 3,000 developers who have made the most contributions and changes to the development of AIX and Dynix.
IBM has now asked for a delay to proceedings to give it more time to file its objections to the order, maintaining that it has a number of unspecified objections and also needs some clarification on certain provisions of the order.
Meanwhile the subpoena of Intel could eventually shed some light on the details of Project Monterey, IBM’s 1998 agreement with the former Santa Cruz Operation Inc in to develop a new version of Unix for Intel’s 64-bit Itanium processors.
The project never achieved its stated goal, with IBM’s AIX 5L for Power processors the only operating system to have been made commercially available from the project. SCO has claimed that IBM breached the contract by not completing it, and further breached the terms of its Unix System V license by contributing Unix code to Linux.
The subpoena directs Intel to nominate an executive to testify on all communications and between the company and SCO or its Canopy Group majority shareholder relating to IBM, Unix and Linux, as well as all contracts and agreements Intel has with SCO, and all business relations between the two companies.
