You remember him, don't you? Remember his leaked memo with all the misspelled words back in March of 2004 that revealed that BayStar was a Microsoft referral and that Microsoft sent $86 million SCO's way, "including BayStar", thanks to Anderer?

And then a few days later, he wrote a letter which he published on NewsForge about Microsoft's plan to destroy Linux, and he described himself like this:

I will file close to 20 patents this year for companies in many spaces, including homeland security, anti-terrorism, several grid computing and virtual machine patents, and, ironically, I should have one issued in the expiring and disappearing e-mail arena. It was initiated 4-5 yrs ago.

Did he neglect to tell us about a patent for a system for software code comparison? When you read the patent description, you'll even find "spectral analysis" mentioned. Have we fingered the "MIT" deep divers at last? Anderer also revealed what he had thought was going to happen in the SCO litigation: "I think one real issue, that people are skirting, is who will be the ultimate guarantor of IP-related issues in a world that is governed by the GPL and GPL-like licenses. I could easily see IBM, HP, Sun, and many of the other large hardware players solving this problem tomorrow by settling the dispute with SCO and maybe even taking the entire code base and donating it into the public domain. I know this is what I originally thought would happen, at least the settlement part."

So sad, when dreams of wealth die, huh? Why would Sun, for one, pay anything for code it has already open sourced, very carefully in a way to keep the GPL out, and then put that code in the public domain? Why would IBM reward SCO's vicious behavior toward them? It probably sounded like a great strategy back in the planning stage to Darl and Mike, but look at it now, how it has played out.

Groklaw already covered the early days and the friendship between Anderer and McBride going back to the '90's, and their business adventures together before SCO began suing the world, and even then, we said that Anderer seemed more involved in the SCO strategy than at first appeared. Now, comes this patent application, which indicates even deeper involvement, if our guess that it's the same man proves to be accurate.

You might recognize some of the other inventors too, from Pointserve: Edward Powell and Mark Lane and also Ed White, who was "formerly co-founder and Vice-President of Engineering of PointServe". When IBM sent PointServe a subpoena, we wrote this:

You remember PointServe. Darl McBride was CEO at PointServe prior to joining FranklinCovey in 2000. And guess who is on the board at PointServe? McBride's old friend, Mike Anderer, the old pal who helped McBride come up with SCO's IP litigation strategy and approached Microsoft on SCO's behalf, according to Newsweek's Brad Stone, which led to the Baystar hookup.

Frank Sorenson noticed something else that is positively riveting. Check out PointServe's management page: G. Edward Powell, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer - ... For eight years prior to founding PointServe, Dr. Powell was a Member of the Technical Staff at the MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory

Mark T. Lane, Chief Scientist - ... Dr. Lane spent 10 years as a member of the Technical Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory

So, what do you think? Has IBM found the "MIT rocket scientists" Darl bragged about and then backed away from and that we imagined had somehow disappeared into the mist or into the Bermuda Triangle, thus becoming, alas, unavailable to testify for SCO as experts at trial about their purported comparisons of UNIX/Linux code?

Looks to me like we might have found not only the "MIT" rocket scientists SCO first bragged about and then clammed up about, but perhaps their method as well. Note some of what the patent says the invention can do:

[0034] For example, the present invention allows an owner of proprietary code to submit their code to a website which compares the code against a database of open source code bases. The database of open source code bases may be an open source UNIX or Linux distribution, for example. In this capacity, the system of the present invention would be used for auditing proprietary code to determine if it contained open source software, or if a particular open source software release contained proprietary software. This audit could be scheduled to run on a periodic basis automatically.

[0035] In another aspect, the database of open source code bases may contain a number popular open source applications of a certain type, such as image manipulation or audio processing applications that may be protected by trade secrets or patents. In this aspect, the input file may be patent claims or design specifications containing concepts that are compared against the concepts in the source code in the database. Thus, while the structure of the two corpuses is different (patent claims on the one hand and source code on the other) it is still possible according to the system of the present invention to determine whether they share concepts in common. . . .

[0038] For example, in another exemplary embodiment, the system of the present invention may take search phrases for comparison against a target corpus of patents, or patent claims for use in a patent search. As discussed earlier, the system parses the search terms for concepts based on natural language processing methods, and assigns raw power values based on the frequency of the concept in the target corpus. In a further aspect, the system may analyze each file in the target corpus (each patent in a patent database, for example), and replace each instance of each concept in the specifications with that concept's respective power. In addition, or in the alternative, the concept may be replaced by its power in the claims, in the case of an infringement analysis. . . .

[0043] More particularly, the process of profiling the corpus involves a multi-source characterization of that corpus along with a one-way transform assigned to preserve the confidentiality, secrecy and integrity of that original code document. Because the corpus may contain trade secrets or other proprietary intellectual property information, it may be necessary to use cryptographic methods to convert that corpus, which is readable by anyone, into a form that is only readable and useful by the system of the present invention and such that the conversion may not be reversed. This protects against the risk that the original corpus may be reverse engineered from the transformed corpus.. . .

[0047] However, a content analysis as noted in quadrant 102 can also be done to determine whether the content of two corpuses is similar even though their structure may differ. The content analysis may use rare word searches to accomplish this function. In the embodiment discussed earlier with respect to source code files and computer programming, while computer programming languages have certain reserved words that are likely to be found in any source code file written in that language, it is not likely that variable names, function names, procedure names or comments will be shared across source code files unless they were written by the same person or unless one was written with the knowledge of the other. Thus, the variable name, function name, procedure name or comment could be the rare word that is searched for in both corpuses. If the rare word is found in both, then it is likely that portions of source code were copied but simply altered in their structural position in the document. For example, if one code file uses an "if-then" statement and another corpus uses a "case" statement, but the variables are the same in the two code files, then the resemblance will be detected by the content analysis using rare word searches. This may reveal that the second corpus code file was written with the in the presence of or with the knowledge of first corpus, that the second corpus was written by someone who also wrote the first corpus, or that the second corpus is simply a rewrite of the first corpus.

[0048] Furthermore, and as illustrated in FIG. 1 at quadrant 103, while two corpuses may have the same structure, they may have different content. In this case, the system of the present invention may perform a spectral or histogram analysis to determine whether certain concepts are found in both documents despite being identified by different terms in the source code file. Thus, in the case of source code, structure could be an "if-then" statement used in both code files. However, if the two code files different variable names within this same structure, the resemblance will not be detected either by a strict textual analysis or content analysis using rare word searches. However, the spectral analysis 103 will detect the presence of similar structure where the rare words, in this case the variable names, are different.

Ah! SCO's favorite words: "concepts", as in methods and concepts. Get it? And "spectral analysis". I think X marks the spot, all right. And so handy for finding patent infringement just when Microsoft is allegedly wanting to find some. Is that a dovetail, or what?

Well, gang, you probably don't need me to tell you what I think the scheme was and is. But don't forget one salient truth: the examples SCO already offered, supposedly found by three teams of deep divers, including the "MIT" scientists, or... um, not *exactly* MIT scientists, or the used-to-be MIT-linked group, depending on which day SCO was blabbing, were shot down in a day:

In a slide show last Monday, SCO showed six examples of Linux files it says were illegally copied from its confidential Unix code.

Linux partisans who obtained a copy of the slide show were quick to trace the examples back to their origins, which appear preliminarily in each case not to belong to SCO.

The company disputes this analysis. “We’re the owners of the Unix (AT&T) System V code, and so we would know what it would look like,” the company told McMillan and the IDG News Service. “Until it comes to court, it’s going to be our word against theirs.”

Not exactly. Not only did the Linux community reveal the code wasn't useful for SCO's purposes, Judge Kimball also found nothing but a surprising lack of evidence. This patent may describe a system for code comparison, but it failed at the most important part, from SCO's standpoint: establishing who actually owns the code.

Prior art, anyone? Here's the patent claims and description, for those who would like to read the entire thing:

*****************************

United States Patent Application	20050216898
Kind Code	A1
Powell, G. Edward JR. ; et al.	September 29, 2005

A system for analyzing similarities between a first and second corpus or between a set of concepts and a corpus uses natural language processing and machine intelligence methods to replace terms or phrases in the corpus with concepts, determine the frequency of each concept in the corpus, and convert the corpus into a concept frequency file to enable easy comparison of the two corpuses or easy retrieval of items from the corpus that contain concept. Difference analysis and a combination of content and spectral analysis may be employed.

    MCKENNA LONG & ALDRIDGE LLP
    1900 K STREET, NW
    WASHINGTON
    DC
    20006
    US

U.S. Current Class:	717/141; 717/114
U.S. Class at Publication:	717/141; 717/114
Intern'l Class:	G06F 009/45