SCO said Wednesday that it has filed subpoenas with the U.S. District Court in Utah, targeting six different individuals or organisations. Those include Novell; Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel; Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation; Stewart Cohen, chief executive of the Open Source Development Labs; and John Horsley, general counsel of Transmeta.
SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said he did not know what the subpoenas asked for, but "I know that some of them have been served."
IBM also has broadened its efforts to respond to the Linux-related lawsuit by asking a federal judge to order SCO to identify illegal source code and serving four other companies with subpoenas of its own.
SCO filed the suit in March, claiming that IBM "contaminated" Linux by illegally incorporating trade secrets inherited from Unix. So far, SCO has listed the names of 591 files in the Linux 2.4 and 2.5 kernels that allegedly contain illicit code but has not been more specific.
IBM's subpoenas were sent on Oct. 30 to BayStar Capital, Deutsche Bank, Renaissance Ventures and The Yankee Group, which have indicated they have reason to believe SCO's claims are legitimate. IBM has cited an Oct. 16 article in the Salt Lake Tribune that reported Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Skiba visited SCO's headquarters and saw a "near exact duplicate of source code between the Linux 2.4 kernel and (SCO's) Unix System V kernel." In October, BayStar Capital invested US$50 million in SCO.
In a statement to CNET News.com on Wednesday, IBM said: "It is time for SCO to produce something meaningful. They have been dragging their feet, and it is not clear there is any incentive for SCO to try this in court." IBM filed motions on Nov. 3 and Nov. 6, asking the court to "issue an order compelling SCO to respond to IBM's interrogatories with specificity and in detail."
SCO's Stowell said his company provided about a million pages of documents in response to IBM's requests. "They are trying to coerce and intimidate," Stowell said, referring to Big Blue's subpoenas. "I think what they're trying to do is that if you're a potential investor in our company or an industry analyst that says anything even remotely favourable toward SCO, you're going to be subpoenaed by IBM."
