SCO, IBM again spar in court over data

Much of Friday's federal court hearing in the SCO Group's $5 billion case against International Business Machines Corp. was deja vu.

U.S. Magistrate Brooke Wells' hearing echoed one in December, with each side claiming it could not fulfill a request for information until it got more information itself from the other party in the discovery phase of the case.

Wells said she would rule within a week whether Lindon-based SCO has complied with her earlier order to provide IBM with certain information and whether SCO can get access to information it wants from IBM, which is based in Armonk, N.Y.

SCO and IBM are locked in suits and countersuits about whether IBM violated its license with SCO by placing parts of SCO's Unix computer operating system source code into Linux, a freely distributed operating system that is developed and enhanced by contributors worldwide. IBM has its own Unix version, called AIX. Dynix is another, developed by Sequent Computer Systems, now owned by IBM.

On Friday, SCO said it had complied with Wells' Dec. 5 order to provide IBM details about the source code SCO claims IBM put into Linux.

SCO attorney Mark Heise said SCO has produced a million pages of documents, 400 million lines of Unix code and 300 million lines of Linux code. He described SCO's efforts to meet IBM's information requests as "a Herculean effort."

He said SCO did not provide line-for-line Unix System V code that IBM put into Linux but that SCO has "identified the technology." SCO cannot, he said, provide the line-for-line information unless it gets source code information from IBM that IBM does not want to release.

"We're at an impasse," Wells told Heise. "We can't be at an impasse and have the case remain at a standstill."

Wells also considered SCO's other rounds of requests for IBM information. Heise said that while IBM has provided 150,000 pages of documents and two CDs of Dynix source code, IBM has yet to give up AIX code or anything from high-level IBM executives.

SCO disagrees it would be burdensome for IBM to provide all of that code information because it is in an IBM central server. "They can get us AIX. It's clear as a bell," Heise said.

SCO wants to know every IBM contribution to Linux and co-called "open source" and who did it, in order to know where SCO should focus its efforts, he said.