The Lindon, Utah-based company is suing IBM for $3bn for breach of contract and misappropriation of trade secrets, and has previously claimed to have positively identified over a million lines of Unix code in Linux.
However, in SCO’s general counsel, Ryan Tibbitts’ declaration to the Utah court that accompanied the company’s recent filing of evidence, SCO states that its engineers have reached the conclusion that parts of Linux have almost certainly been copied or derived from AIX or Dynix/ptx.
Almost certainly is not the same as absolute certainty, especially when referring to what is supposed to be SCO’s evidence that IBM has misappropriated its trade secrets, and especially when the Linux community has been waiting for 10 months for SCO to detail its claims.
Tibbitts’ comments came in his declaration accompanying SCO’s response to a court order forcing it to reveal details of its evidence against IBM. In December the company was given 30 days by the US District Court of Utah to produce evidence supporting its claim that IBM has contributed Unix code to the open source Linux operating system, after IBM had filed two separate motions to compel discovery in October and November 2003.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
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