Wednesday, December 10, 2003

IBM Gets Early Court Victory in SCO/Linux Case

IBM Gets Early Court Victory in SCO/Linux Case: "SCO revealed this week that a judge ruled in favor of IBM last Friday in SCO's trade secret violation lawsuit against the computing giant, a stunning legal victory for IBM. SCO sued IBM earlier this year for $1 billion, alleging that the Linux operating system IBM now supports contains software code stolen from UNIX, the rights to which SCO largely owns. SCO also revoked IBM's UNIX license. However, late last week, IBM found itself on the receiving end of a favorable court decision, resulting in an interesting reversal of fortunes. SCO had been pressuring the courts to force IBM to reveal its UNIX and Linux source code so SCO could prove that IBM was using stolen code. But the judge ruled that SCO would have to present its own UNIX source code first and identify which software code had been stolen.
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But don't worry about SCO, as the company has another legal bomb to drop on IBM: The company said this week it would add a copyright infringement lawsuit to the previous charges. "[SCO] decided to notify the court they will be adding [copyright infringement] as part of the claims," an SCO spokesperson said Monday. "There will be a new filing on that coming out in the near future." SCO says it would have filed copyright infringement claims in its original lawsuit against IBM, but was thwarted when Novell claimed it still owned the UNIX copyright. However, legal documents unearthed in June proved that SCO owns the UNIX copyright, SCO says."

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