SCO may be in trouble because of a lost and found e-mail

A legal website, Groklaw, which is led by Pamela Jones has posted an alleged e-mail from Michael Davidson, which was originally sent Aug. 13, 2002, to SCO employee Reg Broughton, who then forwarded it to SCO CEO Darl McBride.

What seems to be just a simple e-mail could be in fact important evidence in SCO's copyright case versus IBM.

According to this e-mail in August 2002 at SCO was conducted an internal investigation which has found found that Linux does not infringe on SCO's intellectual property.

Pamela Jones Groklaw Web site has posted the alleged e-mail from Michael Davidson, which was originally sent Aug. 13, 2002, to SCO employee Reg Broughton, who then forwarded it to SCO CEO Darl McBride.

"At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever," Davidson wrote in his e-mail. "There is, indeed, a lot of code that is common between UNIX and Linux (all of the X Windows system, for example) but invariably it turned out that the common code was something that both we (SCO) and the Linux community had obtained (legitimately) from some third party."

SCO made a statement in response to the posting:

"This memo shows that Mr Davidson's email is referring to an investigation limited to literal copying, which is not the standard for copyright violations and which can be avoided by deliberate obfuscation, as the memo itself points out.

"Even more importantly, this memo shows that there are problems with Linux. It also notes that additional investigation is required to locate all the problems, which SCO has been continuing in discovery in the IBM and Autozone cases.

"Thus, even aside from the fact that SCO's central contract claims in the IBM litigation involve later Linux versions and different conduct, it would simply be inaccurate and misleading to use Mr Davidson's email to suggest that SCO's internal investigation revealed no problems."

An IBM representative declined to comment. The SCO versus IBM case, which debuted in 2003, is scheduled to go to trial in early 2007.