Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Friday 30/06/2006

At last! That sound, like unto a mighty rushing wind, is the world's largest pigeon coming home to roost in its Utah dovecot. For the judge currently riding the glacially slow SCO vs IBM court case — yes, it's still going on — has finally had it with SCO's consistent refusal to say exactly what it was that IBM was supposed to have done.

"Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus, they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that 'you know what you stole, I'm not telling.' Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalogue of Neiman Marcus' entire inventory and say 'it's in there somewhere, you figure it out.'" — these are the words of a seriously annoyed judge. There's more, lots more, but in the end it boils down to SCO having 183 of its 294 claims being thrown out after IBM objected to 193 of them — and the remaining 10 objected claims are marked as pretty feeble.

It's not the end, but it makes pretty good reading — I recommend you skip over to Groklaw where the incredibly patient PJ remains locked onto the case until it finally ends, like the Voyager space probe hurtling towards Neptune. If I ever get the chance to buy her a Martini, it's hers.

Until that day, keep checking Groklaw. In recent weeks, it's unearthed all manner of interesting bygone evidence — like the way SCO made versions of its own Unix open source, way before it claimed that people were stealing things from it, and books detailing the very trade secrets that the company seems to be claiming were taken. More and more, Darl says less and less... and the final denouement can't be in doubt.

That's a nice thought to take to the weekend.