CA Appoints Transformation ExecCA Appoints Transformation Exec

SCO Group officers and lawyers continued on Monday to pick through last week's 37-page ruling that sidelined much of their $5 billion lawsuit against IBM over Linux operating system code.

Blake Stowell, SCO spokesman, said Monday that SCO lawyers were reviewing the court ruling by Magistrate Brooke Wells, who dismissed 182 of SCO's 294 claims in the case.

Wells ruled that the SCO claims would likely produce nominal damages returns, if there was any merit to SCO's case to begin with.

Filed in 2003, SCO's suit alleged that IBM unlawfully contributed SCO Unix software code to Linux. Among the SCO charges the Magistrate left standing were SCO claims that some Unix code donated to Linux rightfully belong to SCO.

In her ruling, Magistrate Wells said SCO had "willfully failed to comply" with court orders seeking to demonstrate how millions of lines of Linux code had been misappropriated by IBM.

In her decision, she wrote: "It is almost like SCO sought to hide its case until the ninth inning in hopes of gaining an unfair advantage"

Analyst Rob Enderle, who has followed the case closely, said the Wells' ruling was a defeat for SCO's "quantity over quality" approach to the litigation.

On Monday, Stowell said SCO is sticking to earlier statements and has no comment beyond them. "Our legal team is reviewing the judge's ruling and will determine our next steps in the near future," SCO said:

The SCO-IBM battle has resulted in some Byzantine jockeying among prominent lawyers and law firms. Famed litigator David Boies, who once represented IBM in landmark antitrust cases in the 1970s, has been in the SCO corner squaring off against his former IBM client. Not to be outdone, IBM has hired Boies' old firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, to oppose SCO and Boies.