| By Maureen O'Gara |
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| November 14, 2003 12:00 AM EST |
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19,534 |
On the SCO-IBM front, the SCO Group, in pressing its $3 million case against
IBM, has subpoenaed:
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux and chief developer of the Linux kernel;
John Horsley, the general counsel of Transmeta, Torvalds' employer;
Richard Stallman, head of the Free Software Foundation, father of the GPL and
industry gadfly;
Stuart Cohen, CEO of the Open Software Development Lab, where Torvalds works
and where major vendors like IBM are stitching together enterprise-class
versions of Linux;
A John Doe or Does at Novell, which once owned Unix, still claims enough
residual rights in the thing to absolve IBM of any wrongdoing over SCO's head
and now the shiny new owner of SUSE Linux;
And last but not least a John Doe at Digeo, which continues to officially
employ Andrew Morton, the number two guy in Linux kernel development, although
he's working on the kernel at OSDL, just like Torvalds. Torvalds has a similar
arrangement with Transmeta.
SCO is gonna want to rummage through their e-mail and papers. For its part,
IBM has subpoenaed three SCO investors, Baystar Capital, Deutsche Bank and
Renaissance Ventures, as well as Yankee Group analyst Laura DiDio.
As some journalists were, DiDio was shown a slice of SCO's alleged proof that
IBM poached its code and put it in Linux, said it looked like plagiarism to her
and advised clients to proceed with caution and check the language of the
indemnity clause in their contracts with IBM to see who exactly is liable.
Needless to say IBM doesn't indemnify its Linux customers.
SCO calls the IBM subpoenas, especially the DiDio one, "harassment." It
claims IBM is trying to bully its supporters into silence.
Presumably IBM is on a hunting expedition looking to get a better handle on
whatever it is SCO has on them. SCO has yet to lay out its evidence, frustrating
IBM and enraging the entire Linux community.
IBM is irked enough to have asked the court last week to order SCO to detail
its allegations. SCO says it has turned over a million pages of documents to
IBM. Evidently they don't resolve IBM's problem.
IBM might also be looking for evidence of unjust enrichment, given how SCO's
stock price has soared. Besides being an investor, Deutsche Bank issued a "buy"
recommendation on SCO last month after its analyst saw the purportedly
plagiarized code and Renaissance published a report that said the SCO suit was
"well founded."
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