Intel accuses SCO of lying

THE CHUCKLEHEADS at SCO have done it now, and Intel is calling them out. In a court deposition made by Intel after after it was given just a few hours notice to produce documents, lawyers described SCO statements as misrepresentations, half truths and said accusations about its conduct were unfair and untrue.

The whole dispute revolves around SCO and its ever changing litigation against, IBM, Linux, Novell, Daimler-Chrysler. RedHat and Autozone. That story continues and is being covered by Groklaw every day.

To briefly recap, SCO is suing IBM for various things. After several years of litigation, January 27 was the absolute cutoff for discovery requests. At the very last minute, SCO threw out a bunch of requests to Oracle, Intel and The Open Group.

Now, this is a complex business law and technical case, and it takes a lot of preparation and research to fire off a letter, much less to hunt down witnesses and find documents buried in the archives. With the drop dead date on the 27th, SCO wrote the Oracle requests on the 10th, but didn't send them until the 19th.

There were a host of other problems with the requests. When SCO went in front of the judge to beg for more time, it told the judge a bunch of things. Oracle disagreed with its interpretation, fairly strongly in fact, and claimed it had 'proof' to back it up.

The Open Group and Intel's filings took a bit longer to percolate through the legal system. The Intel response is flat out gold though. "Intel is aware that the discovery cut-off can be a hectic time, but SCO's accusations against Intel are unfair and untrue." In court filings, this is unbelievably harsh language.

What did SCO do? Well, if you think that the eight days it generously gave SCO was inadequate, how about 17.5 hours, counting the night? Lawyers sent Intel a deposition notice to provide "communications between Intel and IBM, Intel's relationship with SCO, and issues related to the UNIX application program interfaces, developer guide, application binary interface and interface definition", and three other topics, along with experts to talk about them, in that time frame. Fat chance. To make matters worse, SCO did not confer with Intel before, sent it to the wrong lawyers even thought it had been working with the right ones, had wrong locations, and, and, and.....well the list just continues.

If you want the full breakdown, as of this writing, there is a discussion at Groklaw starting, and there is sure to be more in the next few days as the fur and legal letters fly. Keep an eye on this one, comedy and good legal work is sure to ensue. µ