IBM Drops SCO Countersuit
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Though it says it still believes SCO has infringed on its patents, IBM has dropped its countersuit against SCO in an effort to speed up the court process.

The latest filing was a response to SCO’s September motion to take an additional 25 depositions during discovery, so perhaps IBM would rather keep some facts to itself at the expense of letting SCO ‘get away’ with the alleged patent infringement.

“Based in part on SCO’s effort to expand the number of depositions in the case (and thereby delay its resolution), IBM has agreed to withdraw its patent claims. Thus SCO no longer needs patent depositions, let alone dozens or as many as 65.”

The patent claims covered data compression, graphical menu trees, electronically delivered data objects, and methods for monitoring and recovering subsystems in a distributed/clustered environment.

IBM will continue a number of other counterclaims it has against SCO. It all started two years ago when SCO sued IBM claiming Big Blue had reneged on a mutual agreement by putting parts of SCO’s Unix into the Linux code.

The company also had a big kick at its adversary saying getting money out of SCO would be hard even if it won the patent infringement claims.

Since SCO’s sales have been, and are, limited, a finding of infringement would yield only the most modest royalty or award of damages and would not justify the expense of continuing prosecution of these claims,” said IBM.