NEWS SCO has officially announced the company on the receiving end of its lawsuit – the US' largest car-parts seller, Autozone – alleging the business is violating its intellectual property by running the Linux operating system.
The suit, filed in the US district court in Nevada, demands that AutoZone stops running Linux and pay as-yet-unspecified damages.
SCO announced back in January that it would be going after a Linux user as well as its pursing its suit against IBM over the alleged copyright infringement of Unix, setting a deadline of the middle of February to name the unlucky party.
The slipped deadline – which is probably unrelated to the fact that SCO only opened its Linux licence shop and named a company to actually pay for one such licence within the last week – wasn't mentioned by CEO Darl McBride in the company's quarterly conference today.
He did say, however, that SCO's case was the equivalent of the RIAA's lawsuits against illegal downloaders and hoped that the legal actions would highlight the copyright issue to "users who haven't considered the ramifications." It's not the first time SCO and the RIAA have drawn parallels – SCO's website was downed by a denial of service resulting from the MyDoom virus in January, with a similar attack being launched on the RIAA last month.
Clive Longbottom, service director at analyst house Quocirca, said that he thought the announcement was purely an attempt to "frighten people into paying for a licence... it's the worst kind of FUD from a company that shouldn’t even be in existence," he told silicon.com. "This is putting pressure on people to buy the licences and the uptake so far hasn't been overwhelming... It's not in anyone's interest, including the shareholders'. It's more in Darl's interest – his pension fund has to come from somewhere."
And McBride was making no secret today of what he hopes to gain from the lawsuit, saying that SCO will see "increasing revenue from the initiative" in the coming quarters and reiterated the company's commitment to "rigorously enforce [SCO's] intellectual property."
The furore doesn't seem to bolstering the SCO purse much, however. SCO's revenue for the first quarter of this year was reported at $11.4m – the corresponding quarter of 2004 turned up revenue $13.5m.
Whether or not the suit will actually trouble end users is still open to debate. Novell and Red Hat have indemnified users against any possible legal action and Longbottom believes that IBM would be more than happy to help out any big-hitting Linux users who wanted a licence. "If one of IBM's big customers rings up and says we need six licences at $795 each, I'm sure they'll have a whip round in the office," he said.
SCO's lawyers have another reason to be smiling today. SCO said today that it has spent $3.4m on legal fees this year and has also launched another case against car manufacturer Daimler Chrysler for alleged breach of its Unix software agreement after the company "failed to respond appropriately" to SCO's requests.
This isn't the end of the legal action, according to McBride. SCO will be taking further steps "in the US and around the globe," he said.
Comments
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1. Paul Hands
These lawsuits are another demonsration of SCO's breathtaking mastery of spin and obfuscation. They are both against SCO (former) customers, who converted from SCO Unix to Linux. In one case, SCO even bid for the transition business! The telling thing, once you look at the details, is that SCO are NOT suing for their IP being in Linux, which is what they want the general public to hear. One of them is because Daimler-Chrysler didn't respond to SCO's letter demanding certification of compliance with SCO's terms and conditions. That;s it - they didn't reply to SCO's letter!
The other is the suspicion (they admit that they don't know!) that AutoZone used SCO Unix libraries to enable the running of legacy Unix applications under Linux. They are asking for discovery, so they can go on a fishing trip.
Remember Darl's earlier words - "Contracts are what you use against people you have a relationship with"?
He's proved that he meant it, but surely now, you'd have to be very, very wary of having any dealings with SCO.
2. Paul Hands
These lawsuits are another demonsration of SCO's breathtaking mastery of spin and obfuscation. They are both against SCO (former) customers, who converted from SCO Unix to Linux. In one case, SCO even bid for the transition business! The telling thing, once you look at the details, is that SCO are NOT suing for their IP being in Linux, which is what they want the general public to hear. One of them is because Daimler-Chrysler didn't respond to SCO's letter demanding certification of compliance with SCO's terms and conditions. That;s it - they didn't reply to SCO's letter!
The other is the suspicion (they admit that they don't know!) that AutoZone used SCO Unix libraries to enable the running of legacy Unix applications under Linux. They are asking for discovery, so they can go on a fishing trip.
Remember Darl's earlier words - "Contracts are what you use against people you have a relationship with"?
He's proved that he meant it, but surely now, you'd have to be very, very wary of having any dealings with SCO.
3. Ruprecht
McBride, is truly a man out of touch...
'We are the new RIAA' says McBride...he says it like it's a good thing!?!?!....berk
So, you're desperate to prosecute someone whether you have sufficient (any) evidence or not?
Based on RIAA 'sucesses' so far the next headline will probably read AutoZone - 'We don't actually use Linux!'
;o)
4. anonymous
I wish somebody would stop this extortion. I feel sorry for autozone and if in the US I would be looking to do all I could to support that company from this bully. The only people profiting from this are Microsoft and the Asian Unix / Linux industry
5. Tony O'Grady
Please check the facts on this. The SCO case against AutoParts revolves around SCO's allegation that AutoZone copied SCO's shared libraries to their new linux systems - nothing to do with their SEPARATE case against IBM which appears to be about copying of UNIX code into Linux. I say 'appears' as the documented case and the words from SCO senior staff don't match up and appear to morph through time.
6. anonymous
It will end in tears for SCO. I am sure a lot of computer professionals are incensed at the greed of a pitifully small company to try and cash in what it did not invent.
7. Joe
Pretty soon, it'll be MS and FAT/NTFS, or Apple and HFS/HFS+, or...
You DID KNOW, that filesystems are validly patented, right? Or at least they want the judge to think the patent applys not just to thier way of accessing the partions, but the layout of the partition too (isn't that related to look and feel?). Seems pretty fuzzy, from a technical person's point of view, but the judge likely doesn't have years of experience with the technology. This means that judges have to just deal with what they know, and use experts to explain how it works. The only problem, is that the experts mostly try to skim arround the parts of reality that don't help thier employer's case.
8. Brett Wheeler
I'm surprised that Microsoft hasn't jumped in and started action against SCO for stealing their FUD tactics. Or are they just waiting until SCO has done maximum damage to both Linux and Unix.
On a personal note, SCO will never receive *MY* business, ever! I'll even return to MS before I'll ever deal with SCO again.