Check mate?

I'm not usually a big fan of lawyers and that's partly because I hail from Europe where people are not nearly as litigious as the Americans. Well, that's not really very hard when Americans are the most litgious people on the planet (I think). However when I read articles like this one at eWeek about IBMs latest application for summary dismissal of SCOs copyright litigation, well I have to take my hat off to some smart lawyer working for IBM. It really exposes the fascinating brinksmanship side of great legal battles, although at this point I believe most people would think SCO should be the one looking for a brinksmanship play.

Certainly its a high stakes game and for some IBM lawyer to figure out that SCOs very own actions in trying to collect royalties for Linux mean its effectively torn up the GPL, well that was a master stroke. With the GPL in tatters, SCO is like some minuscule sea critter which finds that the very large cave it just crawled into for shelter is actually a giant fish that has just swallowed it. Now IBM can claim that SCO has demonstrably infringed its copyright on hundreds of thousands of lines of code donated under the GPL for the good of Linux, making SCOs claim of a few thousand lines of stolen code (if that) look like a storm in a teacup. Hence SCO either need to back off its claims of copyright infringement by IBM, or be obliterated by the counter claim against its own infringement.

Like a king locked in the jaws of checkmate, the only honorable thing to do is conceed and step away from the table while it still has at least a shirt for the ride home.