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IBM files for summary judgement in SCO v. IBM Linux case
As reported by Groklaw, now that the discovery phase of the SCO v. IBM trial is over, IBM is asking the judge for a full summary judgment. A summary judgment means that there are "no material issues of fact remaining to be tried" (Wikipedia) which needs to be decided by a jury, and the judge can just go ahead and make a judgement.
IBM seems to be confident that the fact on the table are clear, and in IBM's favor.
It has become clear that SCO has no real claim against the Linux codebase itself, and that the trial at worst will result in IBM paying SCO damages as a purely company-to-company affair, for transgressions such as contract breach.
Wikipedia has a good write-up of the trial.
As can be read, one of SCO's most important claims is that since IBM's own Unix was based on a Unix version (originally licensed from AT&T, with SCO later purchasing AT&T's rights), all code which has touched IBM's Unix, such as JFS, is bound by the licensing terms. The only problem with that argument is that AT&T at the time specifically said that derivative works such as this was not covered, making it obvious to everyone but SCO that their claim was silly. Of course SCO not being fair or reasonable has not admitted the obvious, but it should be very surprising if IBM's summary judgment request was not granted at least on this point.