SCO suffers as courts favor IBM in the Linux related lawsuit

The SCO Group had filed a $5 billion intellectual property rights case against IBM related to the popular Linux operating system.

However, the company has now suffered a major setback as the courts last week threw out the majority of claims brought against IBM by them.

The lawsuit was filed way back in 2003 and is scheduled to go on trial next year. SCO had claimed that IBM “misappropriated confidential and proprietary information” and used pilfered Unix code to help build Linux.

Magistrate Brooke C. Wells of U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City has now dismissed as many as 182 of SCO’s 294 claims in a 39-page ruling. It also criticized the company for failing to comply with repeated requests to provide enough information to IBM related to the lawsuit.

Wells wrote in the judgment: “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’. Given the amount of code that SCO has received in discovery, the court finds it inexcusable that SCO is, in essence, still not placing all the details on the table.”

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