SCO‘s years-spanning lawsuit against IBM (and Novell) alleging the the companies stole code from SCO’s version of Unix and inserted it into the companies’ Linux efforts was dealt a harsh blow last week by Judge Brooke C. Wells of the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City, who dismissed 182 of 294 claims against IBM. In her 39-page ruling (PDF, via GrokLaw), Judge Wells found that SCO failed in most instances to identify the lines of code it alleges IBM stole from SCO.
The caustic case goes back to 2003, when SCO claimed IBM contributed proprietary code from SCO to the open-source Linux operating system, thereby “devaluing” SCO’s products. SCO later extended the case to Novell.
In her ruling, Judge Wells threw out the majority of SCO’s claims based on lack of evidence