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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A U.S. magistrate struck down most of The SCO Group's claims of copyright infringement in the battle over source code in the freely distributed Linux operating system.
Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells dealt what critics called a crippling blow to SCO's $5 billion lawsuit against IBM Corp. Wells dismissed 187 of SCO's 294 legal claims in an order dated Wednesday.
IBM was accused of dumping confidential Unix code into Linux, but Wells ruled SCO had produced virtually no proof of the allegation. She said SCO had "willfully failed to comply" with court orders to show IBM which of millions of lines of code in Linux were supposedly misappropriated.
SCO argued that was IBM's job.
Wells likened SCO's stance to a security guard's accusing a shopper of stealing merchandise -- and demanding the shopper show proof of the theft. "It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole; I'm not telling,"' Wells wrote.
The magistrate said that if there was any merit to SCO's claims, they were likely to produce only nominal damages instead of billions of dollars.
"It is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage despite being repeatedly told to put 'all evidence ... on the table,' " she wrote.
Wells dismissed SCO's arguments that it needed access to IBM engineers to verify its suspicion that IBM gave away proprietary software code to Linux, a work of thousands of hackers.
"SCO's arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM, 'Sorry, we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know,"' the magistrate wrote.
SCO spokesman Blake Stowell acknowledged the ruling was a setback. "If two-thirds of your case is stricken, then it is a pretty serious matter. Our lawyers will determine how we proceed from here," Stowell told The Salt Lake Tribune.
Enderle Group chief analyst Rob Enderle said Wells' ruling was a defeat for SCO's use of a "quantity-over-quality approach to litigation strategy."
Now, "it will be vastly more difficult for them to get funding going forward as a result of the perceptions (stemming from) this decision," Enderle said. "And they are burning through their cash reserves very quickly."
The ruling capped a month of bad news for SCO. Three weeks ago, the company reported that net losses for its most recent quarter had more than doubled to $4.69 million -- largely because of nearly $3.8 million in new litigation expenses.
Any appeal would go to U.S. District Judge David Kimball, who already upheld a previous evidence-related ruling by Wells that SCO appealed.
IBM spokesman John Charlson would only say the world's largest computer company was satisfied to let Wells' decision speak for itself.
"Without a doubt, this is a major blow to SCO," said Pamela Jones, creator and editor of Groklaw.net, a Web site devoted to open-source software legal issues. "There has never been an operating system picked over with such care and determination to find fault, and Linux has come through utterly clean as a whistle."
------ On the Net: www.ibm.com www.sco.com www.groklaw.net
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
