IBM Files Cross-complaint Against SCO
Bob Samson, vice president of systems sales at IBM, sent an e-mail Thursday to the company's sales staff outlining the cross-complaint.
An IBM source said the sales staff will communicate the contents of the e-mail to customers this week.
In the e-mail, obtained by CRN, Samson said the complaint states that IBM believes SCO has violated the General Public License (GPL), under which "it accepted Linux contributions and distributed Linux." The GPL, which governs Linux, allows anyone to use or distribute the operating system so long as changes and modifications to the software are made available to the public.
In its own complaint, IBM also charges that SCO improperly claimed the right to revoke IBM's license. IBM's contract expressly provides that IBM's rights are irrevocable, so SCO should not be able to terminate the license, Samson said in the e-mail.
Finally, IBM claimed SCO has infringed on four IBM patents with its UnixWare, Open Server, SCO Manager and Reliant HA clustering software products.
"IBM is seeking compensatory and punitive damages and an injunction requiring SCO to refrain from misrepresenting its rights and to cease further infringement of IBM's patents," Samson said in the e-mail. "We continue to vigorously defend ourselves. And we see similar resolve across the industry with regard to Linux, just as it has supported important, sometimes disruptive, efforts like TCP/IP and the Internet."
IBM has filed the suit in a federal court in Utah, according to IBM. (To view the entire complaint, click here.)
In a statement, an SCO spokeman said, "We view IBM's counterclaim filing today as an effort to distract attention from its flawed Linux business model. It repeats the same unsubstantiated allegations made in Red Hat's filing earlier this week. If IBM were serious about addressing the real problems with Linux, it would offer full customer indemnification and move away from the GPL license."
Regarding IBM's patent infringement claim against SCO, SCO countered that it has been shipping those products for years and IBM never objected until now.
In March, SCO sued IBM, charging that the computer giant had violated the terms of its Unix license by providing unauthorized access to covered source code to the open-source community. Since then, a number of companies, including Red Hat and Novell, have jumped into the fray and launched their own suits against SCO.
SCO has continuously stood behind its charges of intellectual copyright violations and recently asked Linux users to pay SCO a license fee, but the open-source community has defended Linux forcefully. Red Hat, for example, this week pledged $1 million to a legal fund to protect Linux users who might come under fire from SCO.