The details appear in a declaration by SCO attorney John Harrop, filed last week, that's part of the Lindon, Utah-based company's breach-of-contract suit against IBM. The allegation that Linux infringes on Unix copyrights is also at the heart of a separate case against AutoZone that a judge on Monday partially stayed.
In the AutoZone matter, the auto parts retailer had sought to put the case on hold until after the resolution of SCO's lawsuits against IBM and earlier Unix owner Novell, and of Linux seller Red Hat's suit against SCO.
Federal Judge Robert C. Jones of U.S. District Court in Nevada granted AutoZone's request to stay the case--with the caveat that SCO will have 60 days for discovery and 30 days for depositions, after which it will have the option of filing a motion for a preliminary injunction, SCO said in a statement.
A summary judgment is judgment without trial; such judgments are made in cases where the facts are not disputed. The judge simply makes a ruling. SCO is arguing against resoluton of the case through summary judgment.
"Part of the reason IBM filed its summary judgment motion was to flush out as much of SCO's theory and evidence as possible," said David Byer, an intellectual property attorney at Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault. And a few details have apparently come out.
Some of the areas mentioned in the newer legal documents are ones that have been discussed before--for example, the Linux and Unix treatment of inter-process communication (IPC) for exchanging information between different operations and read-copy update (RCU) for situations when multiple processes must read or write the same data without stepping on one another's toes.
But other areas are newer, according to the company. One is user level synchronization (ULS), used for coordinating separate instruction sequences; another is the Executable and Linking Format (ELF), the standard that defines the structure of programs that a computer can run; a third is the System V init program that is used when a Linux or Unix computer starts up. System V is a version of Unix that SCO's predecessors licensed to several companies.
IBM declined to comment for this report. However, Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds dismissed the information as old news about technology from IBM, not about System V Release 4 (SVR4) Unix.
"It's the same RCU etc. stuff, which is all-IBM code and has nothing to do with SVR4 or anything else that SCO purports to own," Torvalds said in an e-mail.
Still, Torvalds said SCO's case remains unfounded. "They won't find anything. They lied from day one," he said.
Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff also remained skeptical. The copying examples SCO provides "aren't presented in the context of a specific copyright claim but, rather, as illustrative of a more generalised copying of Unix into Linux," he said.
"SCO continues to de-emphasise 'literal copying,' while Linux as an illegal derivative work continues to take center stage, with a bit of 'all Unix methods and concepts belong to us' thrown in," Haff said.
SCO indeed has plans to emphasise the copying of general structure more than specific lines of code, chief executive Darl McBride said in an interview in March: "The biggest area in the AutoZone case has to do with these nonliteral infringements--code sequence and organisation."
SCO changes it story, yet again.
Show us the 'million lines of code' proof you claimed last year, SCO.
Or just just do us all a favour and slink away into the recesses of history. No one will miss you. Except for Microsoft.