Where's the beef ... er, the System V?

[unixronin]

The Register reports that SCO claims to have fully complied with IBM's interrogatory #12, but that SCO's declaration mentions only AIX and Dynix, and nothing about System V.  This appears to be an admission-by-omission from SCO that, contrary to SCO's charges, no System V code has been copied into Linux.  Needless to say, such an admission would be very, very bad for SCO.  Groklaw has the entire text of the declaration, and based on this declaration, it doesn't appear SCO can say anything more definite than "The engineers who worked on the code IBM contributed to Linux appear to have been familiar with how that code was implemented on AIX and Dynix/ptx."  Well, DUH!

Now SCO is saying that to completely respond to the interrogatory (yeah, the one they just said they fully complied with), they need IBM to give them complete source code for the most recent versions of AIX and Dynix, and they need 90 days to analyze it.  I dunno about you, but what I think when I hear this is that if SCO can't give IBM a list of infringing code without first analyzing up-to-date IBM source code that they've just stated they don't have and never had, then that means the charges they filed against IBM were a mixture of guesswork and speculation... in other words, that they basically didn't have a case at the time that they filed.  And if I was the judge in this case, and I figured that out, I'd be strongly inclined not only to kick SCO and their case out of my courthouse, but to make an award of legal costs to IBM and fine SCO for contempt of court for bringing a frivolous lawsuit.