Red Hat wants blood in SCO battle

Found on The Inquirer on Tuesday, 20 April 2004
Browse Software

According to Cnet, the company wants to carry on with its law suit against SCO and get a declaration from the beak that it isn't violating SCOs copyrights or trade secrets.

SCO is on the ropes at the moment after losing a large chunk of its legal fighting funds when its VC Baystar backed out of the company.

SCO sued Big Blue last March claiming that IBMs move to Linux had broken a contract between the pair. In February this year SCO added an allegation that IBM had infringed its copyright by using Linux, which it believes features code it owns.

However Red Hat's lawyers argued that the SCO and IBM case is all about a contractual relationship between IBM and SCO. Red Hat's action, it says, concerns the damage SCO has done and is continuing to do to Red Hat.

Its lawyers claim that Red Hat is suffering injustice as a result of the hold, because it leaves SCO open to pursue its campaign against Linux and force Red Hat customers "to sign licences to use open-source code that SCO did not even develop."

It's about time for some final decisions. The current status gives SCO the chance to sue users to fill their pockets for the lawsuit. If they really could prove that they own Linux, they would have done so already.