SCO hits back at Red Hat

By Stuart Finlayson

The SCO Group has hit back against Linux distributor Red Hat by filing a motion to dismiss Red Hat's lawsuit against SCO.

SCO sought to dismiss the lawsuit by arguing that its action against the open source software community was not specifically aimed at Red Hat.

SCO started the row that that shook the IT industry back in march when it sued IBM for US$3 billion, claiming that Big Blue illegally incorporated chunks of SCOs Unix code into its version of Linux. SCO then send letters to corporate IT managers warning that their continued use of Linux could lead to their facing legal action, unless they paid SCO a licence fee.

Red Hat responded early last month by filing a lawsuit against SCO, claiming that accusations of copyright infringement against the open source operating system were "unfair and deceptive."

IBM launched a countersuit against SCO in the same week as Red Hat took action, claiming that a significant amount of IBM proprietary code exists within SCOs software.

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