And the esteemed miss DiDio now has some explaining to do...
--snip
If this doesn't make your blood boil, see your doctor right away.
We have obtained the August 13, 2002 Michael Davidson email to Reg Broughton, who forwarded it to Darl McBride with a cover note. It was previously sealed, and you can see why SCO would want it to be. It records Davidson's memories of Bob Swartz' earlier months-long code comparison between Linux and several versions of AT&T's Unix for oldSCO.
Davidson reports:
The project was a result of SCO's executive management refusing to believe that it was possible for Linux and much of the GNU software to have come into existance without *someone* *somewhere* having copied pieces of proprietary UNIX source code to which SCO owned the copyright. The hope was that we would find a "smoking gun" somwhere in code that was being used by Red Hat and/or the other Linux companies that would give us some leverage. (There was, at one stage, the idea that we would sell licenses to corporate customers who were using Linux as a kind of "insurance policy" in case it turned out that they were using code which infringed our copyright).
So, Darl's SCOsource scheme wasn't even original, was it? SCO *hoped* to find copyright infringement so they could make some money selling "insurance" for Linux, the email says. Sound familiar? And after all that effort, what did they find?
At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.
This email is dated August 13, 2002, and Darl became CEO June 28, 2002. So now what do you think he was hired for? I note Davidson says he no longer has the report. My favorite sentence is Davidson saying that once you find evidence of copyright infringement, it's easy to prove. Indeed. And two years and counting, we're still waiting for any evidence. We first heard about this email at the September 2004 hearing, and now we get to read it for ourselves. Davidson was on the list of SCO people IBM deposed that we saw last June, 2004, and now we likely know why. More on Davidson here, where we learn SCO did eventually dig up the study the Davidson email is describing and turn it over in discovery.
...
--snap
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050714144923365