OT: Cutthroat Microsoft Tactic

[Mudshark]

From the IBM employee web site;
IBM Launches counter claims against SCO



Earlier this year, The SCO Group filed a lawsuit claiming that IBM improperly contributed SCO intellectual property to Linux. Since the original filing, SCO has amended its complaint. And, on August 6, IBM responded to SCO's amended complaint and filed a counter-suit on a range of issues.

IBM continues to vigorously defend itself against SCO's allegations. The company sees no merit in SCO's claims, and no supporting facts. Simply put, SCO's scheme is an attempt to profit from its limited rights to a very old UNIX operating system by introducing fear, uncertainty and doubt into the marketplace.

IBM counterclaims are detailed in the legal filing, but the key points are: • SCO has violated the GNU General Public License, under which it accepted Linux contributions and distributed Linux.
• SCO has improperly claimed the right to revoke IBM's UNIX license, despite the fact that IBM's contract expressly provides that IBM's rights are irrevocable and that Novell, which is a party to the agreement under which IBM obtained an irrevocable and perpetual UNIX license, agrees that SCO cannot terminate IBM's license and has exercised its right to waive this claim.
• SCO has directly infringed four IBM patents relating to SCO's commercially available UnixWare, Open Server, SCO Manager and Reliant HA clustering software products.

IBM is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as an injunction requiring SCO to refrain from misrepresenting its rights and to cease further infringement of IBM's patents.

As IBM continues to defend itself, the rest of the industry appears to have similar resolve with regard to Linux. There is an informative analysis of the SCO complaint available on the Open Source Development Lab Website entitled, "Questioning SCO: A Hard Look at Nebulous Claims," by Eben Moglen, General counsel of the Free Software Foundation. It puts the SCO claims in the proper perspective for Linux Users. There is also additional information about the lawsuit on IBM's SCO Complaint page.

Linux continues to gain momentum. IBM has never had a LinuxWorld more overflowing with innovation, offerings and news (see SuSE and IBM achieve government certification for Linux). IBM will continue to drive both AIX and Linux. And, IBM is as committed as ever to meeting customers' needs.