Xinuos sues IBM

Is this lawsuit serious, or have they simply hoping that they've set their sights low enough that they'll get paid to go away even by people who have proven that they'll bear the cost of standing up for their principles?

If the SCO-IBM lawsuit has taught us one thing it is that IBM doesn't pay a plaintiff to “go away”. They leave a smoking crater where the plaintiff used to be. To them it's a matter of not creating a precedent that would encourage others to try the same tactic on them, and they have pockets that are deep enough to litigate this until the Second Coming if necessary.

If this goes forward it will probably play out just like the other lawsuit: The court will ask Xinuos to come up with actual evidence (such as the lines of code that were allegedly copied into Linux from Project Monterey via AIX), and the plaintiff will hem and haw for a while before the whole thing is stopped by a summary judgement. It won't go anywhere near a jury. If anything, IBM and Red Hat are better placed to defend themselves now than they used to be in the 2000s, because the provenance of code in Linux is much better documented and easier to look into than it was. (And we don't even need Groklaw to figure this out for us.)