After IBM sent a blizzard of subpoenas to analysts and investment companies this week The SCO Group followed suit today. IBM, which is filing a countersuit against SCO, says it is frustrated by SCO not revealing its hand. Although SCO has attempted to collect a fee from Linux users, and claimed that IBM owes it $3 billion, the company has only shown fragments of code to support its case.
IBM's wide ranging countersuit has snared Baystar Capital, Deutsche Bank, Renaissance Ventures and Yankee Group, who are either investors in the SCO Group, or who have seen the code under SCO's restrictive conditions, according to Forbes.
Luminaries such as Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Torvalds past and present employers at Transmeta and OSDL have received subpoenas, according to CNET, although Groklaw notes that Torvalds only received his this evening.
With the case not due to be heard until 2005, the subpoenas are likely to form part of the discovery process. It's hard to see what SCO hopes to discover from Stallman, who wrote the GPL but contributed no kernel code. Perhaps they're specifically targeting EMACS? ®
