Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells, of the US District Court Central Division, District of Utah, threatened this week to derail SCO's lawsuit against IBM.

In a scathing 39-page report, Judge Wells said that SCO has failed to prove that its intellectual property was misappropriated by IBM when code was made freely available for the Linux operating system.

The report noted that "the court finds that SCO has failed in part to meet the level of specificity required by this court's orders". Judge Wells added that the court finds SCO's arguments "unpersuasive".

"SCO's arguments are akin to SCO telling IBM: 'Sorry we are not going to tell you what you did wrong because you already know,'" she said.

Judge Wells has dismissed 182 of SCO's 294 claims in the suit. But perhaps the most blistering attack came when she likened the situation to an alleged shoplifter being arrested but not charged with a specific theft.

"If an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of [department store] Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole," said the judge.

"It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused: 'You know what you stole and I'm not telling.' Or to simply hand the accused individual a catalogue of the store's entire inventory and say: 'It's in there somewhere, you figure it out.'"

But the judge acknowledged that SCO provided some very important questions that could materially affect the case and are nearly impossible to answer. For example, the judge questioned whether the disputed code is still in use in Linux.

If it is not, according to the judge, damages may become nominal instead of in the billions. Or, it may be possible that the code comprising a method or concept was already disclosed pursuant to some other licence such as the BSD Licence.

"Since Linux uses some BSD code this could have a substantial impact on SCO's case," she said.