The latest legal interchange between SCO and IBM concerns discovery. That Big Blue meanie, IBM, is asking the judge to dismiss the case and thus kill the entertaining stream of news that it regularly produces. SCO accuses IBM of not handing over millions of lines of code for SCO to analyze - indeed stonewalling - in order to deny SCO the ability to prove its ever-so-reasonable case. (After all, what’s $5 billion between friends). SCO is also asking for IBM to provide a roadmap to help it analyze the code.

SCO attorney Frederick Fry was quoted as saying “IBM has no right to require us … to do this (comparison) manually.” Now I had to read that twice to get the gist.

I always considered SCO to be pretty well up-to-speed with technology and yet it seems that SCO has not yet discovered the possibility of using computers to compare text strings. Let me tell you SCO, manual is not the best means of proceeding.

But can this be? In the age of Google where multi-billions of web pages are indexed daily for content and you can enter virtually any phrase said by anyone ever, that was written down, and Google will return it (along with an advert or two). What could possibly explain such a comment?

Perhaps it all has to do with lawyers. Maybe the lawyers are insisting themselves on examining the code by eye - and thus racking up legal fees at the speed of light.

IBM attorney David Marriott was quoted as saying that “SCO employees Unix / Linux code comparison found only 300 somewhat similar lines from tens of millions of lines of code”, and he claimed that they were neither legally significant nor truly similar.

Fight fair IBM, if they are using manual methods to identify common lines of code, then its going to take a few years yet for them to get to a thousand or two lines and you can’r expect the lines to be exactly identical. Come on.

My proposed solution to this problem is that SCO should outsource the work of comparing lines of code to a large outsourcing concern. IBM of course does a great business in outsourcing, and thus should be allowed to tender for the contract, but my expectation is that such a lucrative contract would probably go elsewhere - to one of those dastardly Indian companies that keep winning business on the basis of price.

As far as I know (and I may be wrong about this) there is no open source source code comparison software available right now - and don’t pretend that VI is adequate for the job - we’re looking for something here that lawyers can use and judges can understand. So there’s an opening for someone in the Open Source community.