SCO toiling to subpoena and depose Net blogger

SCO Group Inc. officials want to subpoena and depose an anti-SCO Internet blogger in connection with not one, but two, of the company's lawsuits.

That is, if they can find her.

The Lindon-based company last week filed a memorandum in federal court in Salt Lake City to have a deposition of Pamela Jones, who runs groklaw.net, be part of SCO's lawsuit against International Business Machines Corp. It already is part of SCO's litigation against Novell.

SCO has until April 30 to serve Jones and take the deposition in the Novell case but claimed in its memo that Jones has "fled" in

order to avoid it. In reply, Jones said on Groklaw that "no one came to serve me that I ever knew about."

Groklaw has been a constant SCO critic since SCO filed its intellectual property suit against IBM four years ago. SCO has a multibillion-dollar suit contending that IBM violated a licensing contract by putting SCO's Unix computer operating system source code into Linux, a "kernel" used in a free "open source" operating system. Novell, meanwhile, contends that it, and not SCO, owns the Unix copyrights.

U.S. Judge Dale Kimball has pushed back the trial in the IBM case until the SCO/Novell case is resolved.

The SCO memorandum filed last week and Jones' response on Groklaw read like textbook "he said/she said" banter:

• SCO claims Jones is "not an objective commentator but rather a vehicle though which opponents of SCO have conducted their case against SCO in the court of public opinion, where no gatekeeper monitors the reliability of content."

Jones has said she is a paralegal operating the blog for several reasons.

• SCO says it has yet to serve Jones with a subpoena for her deposition. "Obviously aware of SCO's designs to depose her, Ms. Jones has neither accepted service of the subpoena nor agreed to appear for deposition but rather appears to have fled and evaded service of the subpoena," it said, adding that Jones realizes SCO is trying to serve her with the subpoena because Jones has discussed the matter on Groklaw.

Jones said SCO is wrong in claiming she went on vacation in February to avoid service of the subpoena. "When I took my health break from Groklaw, I didn't go away on a vacation," she wrote. "I just went to bed and went offline to rest. That made me 'easier' to serve."

Jones wrote she was unaware that anyone tried to serve her the subpoena and that no one told her of any deposition date.