It is not quite true, as SCO's opponents say, that the company has refused to provide any proof of its claims. Since June, SCO has been offering to show its code to anyone willing to sign a strict nondisclosure agreement requiring them to keep what SCO presents confidential. But by many accounts, this provision has greatly limited the number of qualified people who can see the code.

According to Ian Lance Taylor, one developer willing to sign the NDA, the contract prevents the signer from revealing anything you see in SCO's presentation, even code that you previously knew about. People who work on Linux, then, would not be able to sign the NDA, "as it easily could prevent them from ever again working on the kernel," Taylor wrote in an account of his visit to SCO's headquarters that was published in Linux Journal in June.

Taylor's article, which was cited in many blogs and discussion sites, has become proof to some people that SCO is blowing smoke. Chris Sontag, a vice president at SCO, showed Taylor two source files -- one he claimed was from SCO's Unix code, and one from Linux. "The identical portions of the code were highlighted," Taylor wrote. "There were indeed substantial similarities in the code: very similar comment text, the same variable names, the same algorithm. There also were some differences, but it seemed quite plausible that both pieces of code came from the same source." But SCO refused to show Taylor a "revision history" of the files, meaning that it was impossible for him to tell which code appeared where first. Was the code in the Linux file taken from the Unix file, or was it the other way around?

Taylor noticed another chink in SCO's argument: "The code is fairly trivial -- the kind of stuff I wrote in school," he wrote in Linux Journal. "The similar portions of the code were some 80 lines or so. Looking around the Net, I found close variants of the code, with the same comments and variable names, in sources other than Linux distributions. The code is not in a central part of the Linux kernel. The code does not appear to have been contributed to Linux by SCO or Caldera. The code exists in current versions of the Linux kernel." (Taylor also added that "SCO's example unsettled me by what it implies. Although in itself trivial, it does suggest that some Linux contributors may have been careless about copyright infringement. That is unfortunate.") In an interview, Taylor said that SCO told him there were many more examples of infringing code, but he wonders, he said, "why they wouldn't lead with their best stuff."

When asked about reactions like Taylor's, Blake Stowell, of SCO, gave a puzzling answer. Many of the people who have been unimpressed by SCO's presentation "have not been developers," he said, and they may not have understood the importance of what they were seeing. (Taylor, in fact, is a developer.) Stowell then pointed to several technology analysts who had seen the code and came away thinking that SCO could possibly have a case -- but none of these people are developers.

One analyst Stowell cited was Laura DiDio, of the Yankee Group. DiDio, a personable woman who has been covering technology for decades, first as a journalist and then as an analyst, says that one of her strengths is that "I call it as I see it -- I have no qualms about criticizing any vendor." And when it comes to companies who have bet their fortunes on Linux and other open-source software, Didio says she sees much to criticize.

"The thing about Linux is, you can talk about a free, open operating system all you want, but you can't take that idea of free and open and put it into a capitalist system and maintain it as though it is some kind of hippie commune or ashram," she said in a phone interview from her home in Massachusetts. "Because if you can do it like that, at that point I'm like, 'Pass the hookah please!'"

DiDio did not sign an NDA to see SCO's code -- doing so is against the Yankee Group's policy -- but she says she did give the company her word that she would not violate the terms of the agreement. It is not clear whether she was shown the same code that Taylor was shown, but she was slightly more impressed by what she saw. "It appeared as though the Unix System V code" -- that is, SCO's code -- "complete with the developer notes had been copied and pasted right into Linux," she said. "OK now, that said, that is not empirical proof of anything. It's just what it looked like to me, and they showed us snippets of things, so I can't state with absolute certainty what it meant. But what I came away thinking was that if this is what it appeared to be, then SCO has a credible case."

Taylor and DiDio did not react especially differently to SCO's presentation; they both say that what they saw did not either prove or disprove SCO's case, and they only appear to differ in which side they're more willing to accord the benefit of the doubt. At the very least, it can be said that SCO's case is not cut and dried -- but neither, it seems, will IBM's case be a slam dunk.

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