Torvalds Gets Legal Help as SCO Versus IBM Rumbles On.

The Open Source Development Lab Inc says that it will help out its employee, and the inventor of Linux, Linus Torvalds, by hiring lawyers to represent him in the ongoing legal battle between IBM Corp and SCO Group Inc.

Torvalds, along with Stuart Cohen, chief executive of the Beaverton, Oregon-based OSDL, was last week served with a subpoena by Lindon, Utah-based SCO, which claims that IBM has violated its contractual agreements and SCO's intellectual property by transferring Unix System V code into the Linux kernel.

Armonk, New York-based IBM denies the claims and last week issued subpoenas of its own to SCO investors and analysts that have followed the company in recent months. The issuing of subpoenas is the latest twist in the long-running case that is not expected to enter court until 2005.

Another twist last week saw both IBM and SCO accusing each other of dragging their heels. SCO claimed that IBM has been less than forthcoming with the documents and files it believes are vital to its legal case. A SCO company spokesperson claimed that while his company has submitted one million documents to IBM, IBM has surrendered just 100,000 pages.

Meanwhile, IBM is also getting frustrated with SCO. On October 1 IBM filed with the court a motion to compel discovery - essentially IBM asking SCO to specify exactly what trade secrets and code it says IBM has misappropriated.

SCO has also filed a motion to compel discovery, on November 4, asking for more information from IBM, while issuing an opposition to IBM's motion to compel, stating that it had already answered IBM's questions.

This prompted IBM to file a second motion to compel discovery on November 8, once again asking SCO to hand over documents relating to the case, and accusing the company of repeating answers that IBM has already complained are unsatisfactory.

"Instead of providing the information requested, SCO merely offers a single sentence explanation and incorporates by reference its responses to IBM's Interrogatory Nos. 1, 2 and 4, to which SCO has declined to provide meaningful answers," reads IBM's memorandum in support of its second motion to compel discovery.

In relation for the one million documents SCO says it has filed with the court, IBM maintains that this is of one quality, rather than quantity. "SCO has produced scanned images of a paper printout of the source code for a number of its Unix products," continues the memorandum in support of its second motion. "However, it is machine-readable code that is necessary to perform the kinds of analyses that SCO acknowledges it understood from the beginning of the case that IBM would be required to perform."

IBM has requested that both its motions to compel be heard on December 5, the date already set for oral arguments, and already targeted by SCO as a chance to present its arguments that IBM is stalling. A hearing is, meanwhile, also planned for November 21 in which both sides will update Judge Dale A. Kimball on the status of the case.