IBM Denies Destroying Evidence in SCO Case

Rob writes "IBM Corp has denied claims made by SCO Group that it destroyed evidence relevant to their ongoing breach-of-contract and copyright case, maintaining that SCO has had the evidence in question in its possession since March 2005. SCO, which believes IBM breached a contract by contributing Unix code to the Linux operating system, accused IBM of destroying evidence in a July 2006 court filing, claiming that "IBM directed 'dozens' of its Linux developers within its LTC [Linux Technology Center] and at least 10 of its Linux developers outside... to delete the AIX and/or Dynix source code from their computers.""

Ever heard of Groklaw?

[nadamsieee]

This was reported [groklaw.net] a week ago on Groklaw (in much greater detail).

Deleting a Sandbox -- Not the Repository

[gtwilliams]

This is old news. [groklaw.net]

IBM instructed developers to purge their sandboxes. This, of course, has nothing to do with the source code in IBM's source control systems. It's just working copies on developers' machines.

Re:What cojones!

[TubeSteak]

So, IBM prudently directed developers who were going to work on Linux to get rid of the AIX and Dynix source on their machines prior to beginning Linux development work. Now SCO wants the court to interpret this attitude of respect for AT&T/Novell/SCO/TSG IP as bad-faith destruction of evidence.

Except that isn't what constitutes bad-faith destruction of evidence.

The two really key parts of TFA are:
1. "Despite SCO's dogged efforts, it can identify nothing that has been destroyed."
2. "IBM also maintained that SCO did not show that IBM acted in bad faith or that SCO suffered any prejudice, and that SCO agreed in March 2006 that there were no disputes between the two parties over discovery evidence."

Basically, SCO can't prove shiat and even if they could, it's too late; since SCO already said that there were no evidentiary problems.

As others have said, Groklaw goes more indepth, but those two facts are all you really need to understand the issue.

Re:What a mess!

[Colin Smith]

That's the Broken Window Fallacy. Money not wasted on lawsuits could be spend on something else, specifically something else that provides the economy (and the involved company) with more utility

I think that was the parent poster's point.
 

It's impossible to prove a negative

[msobkow]

SCO is making claims that cannot be proven either way. If there had been such file deletion, the files are gone so there is no proof they were ever there. If there had never been such files, the drives are in the same state as if they had existed and been deleted.

Time to stop playing word games.

Hang the SCO team or line them up in front of a firing squad. This witchhunt has gone on too long. They've used the courts to try to extort customer license fees, they've used the courts to impose heavy expenses on their targets, and they've used the courts to dig for evidence of vague claims without performing the due diligence of searching the public OSS archives first.

Fraud at the least, but I expect SCO is guilty of much worse. Stock manipulation. Extortion. Anything else?

Scrap the firing squad. Hang them and let the bodies rot in public so every other IP leech out there knows what their fate will be.

Slightly OT: Computer Forensics

[Spaceman40]

If there had never been such files, the drives are in the same state as if they had existed and been deleted.

That's not technically true. While I agree with your general sentiment (this trial really needs to end), and while SCO's spin on this makes me dizzy, there are still ways to find evidence that has been deleted off a hard drive. (As long as the drive still exists, you can pull things off of it. The earlier after a deletion, the better chance you have to find things, but unless the developers were used to writing over the entire drive -- and had done so after the deletion of code -- there is most likely some of it left on the drive.)

Just so you know.