Judge orders SCO to prove Linux infringement claims
Judge orders SCO to prove Linux infringement claims
IBM have struck an important blow in its legal battle with the SCO Group after the judge presiding over the case ordered SCO to show within 30 days which part of Linux it believes it has proprietary rights over which it claims IBM is infringing.
IBM has been pressing for SCO to back up its claims of copyright infringement, which has so far been met with resistance from SCO, whose CEO Darl McBride said that the company would be happy to show its evidence at an appropriate time in a court setting. Now that its hand has been forced, SCO will have to do just that.
The legal row began back in March, when SCO sued IBM for US$3 billion over what it alleged was copyright infringement on the part of Big Blue, who SCO said used code from SCO's proprietary Unix to Linux. SCO is also pursuing large corporate users of Linux for compensation in the form of licensing revenue for the part of Linux it believes belongs to it.
After that opening salvo from SCO, IBM launched a countersuit against SCO back in early August, claiming that it breached the terms of the General Public License (GPL) under which it distributed a version of Linux, and violated four of IBM's patents. Additionally, IBM has also claimed that SCO has violated copyrights on seven pieces of IBM-copyrighted software that IBM contributed to Linux under the GPL.
Meanwhile, in an open letter posted on the company's website, SCO CEO Darl McBride invoked the Founding Fathers in the court battle, claiming that the GPL, under which Linux is distributed, violates the United States Constitution and the US copyright and patent laws.
"In the past 20 years, the Free Software Foundation and others in the Open Source software movement have set out to actively and intentionally undermine the US and European systems of copyrights and patents. Leaders of the FSF have spent great efforts, written numerous articles and sometimes enforced the provisions of the GPL as part of a deeply held belief in the need to undermine or eliminate software patent and copyright laws," said McBride in his posting.
He also accused Linux distributor Red Hat of taking a stance against intellectual property rights.
"Red Hat's position is that current US intellectual property law "impedes innovation in software development" and that "software patents are inconsistent with open source/free software." Red Hat has aggressively lobbied Congress to eliminate software patents and copyrights.
"At SCO we take the opposite position. SCO believes that copyright and patent laws adopted by the United States Congress and the European Union are critical to the further growth and development of the US$186 billion global software industry, and to the technology business in general."
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