News 

IBM had put in several attempts at having the case moved to a summary judgement - where the judge can rule on the case without a full trial. In his order, Judge Kimball granted none of these, saying that until all the facts were in front of the court, it was too early to do so. He went so far as to ban any further such motions unless they could clearly be ruled on immediately.

SCO said in a statement: 'We are pleased by the court's order denying all three of IBM's motions to effectively dismiss SCO claims without a trial. Coupled with last month's ruling from the Magistrate Judge on discovery, we are looking forward to our day in court.'

SCO is suing IBM alleging that that Big Blue's engineers illegally copied Unix proprietory code into Linux.

However, Judge Kimball described SCO's attitude as 'cavalier' as the company had yet to produce any evidence that IBM had illegally used Unix code.

'Viewed

He also stated he found it 'puzzling' that SCO had denied alleging that IBM had infringed its copyright through its activities in Linux, citing evidence that it clearly had done so.

While IBM's moves to have the case put to summary judgement were not granted, those that were denied were denied without prejudice. This means that IBM could subsequently request such an action in future when all the evidence is in.

Jason Schultz, attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation concluded the order as a fairly emphatic victory for IBM.

'I had suspected that the judge would deny IBM's motions without prejudice because discovery is still ongoing. However, it's clear from the language of the ruling that the judge would grant IBM's motion on the copyright issues if discovery were closed now. So this means that unless SCO comes up with more evidence than it currently has, it will lose its copyright claims against Linux. We'll see if SCO can manufacture more evidence, but at this point, it looks unlikely. So what this order tells us is that we may have to wait a bit longer to get the result, but the result will most likely be a win for IBM,' he said.