IBM has brought out the heavy guns against SCO. In court Monday, IBM submitted a motion for summary judgement against SCO forbidding SCO to distribute products licensed under the GLP, including 783,000 lines of copyrighted IBM code which SCO copied from 16 different software packages, some of which SCO was still distributing via the Web as recently as August 4. IBM's injunction, on the grounds that SCO violated the terms of the GPL, could provide the first major court challenge of the validity of the GPL, and with IBM's legal department behind it, it's likely to stand. IBM's motion asserts that SCO has unlawfully exercised IBM's rights to its works and therefore infringed IBM's copyrights, and asks for a permanent injunction barring SCO from distributing Linux code copyrighted by IBM.
Groklaw says of the motion,
Man, this just isn't SCO's week. IBM has just filed *another* Motion for Partial Summary Judgment, this one on its 8th Counterclaim, the one for copyright infringement. No, silly, not IBM copying SCO. It's where IBM says that SCO has literally copied more than 783,000 lines of code from 16 packages of IBM's copyrighted material. They are asking for summary judgment as to liability and a permanent injunction.
Here's the lesson. You don't ever want IBM legally mad at you.
SCO and friends keep floating these rumors about SCO settling or being bought up. I think IBM has other plans, like crushing SCO like a bug.
And it couldn't happen to a nicer company....