IBM Drops Patent Fight With SCO

IBM dropped four claims that SCO infringed upon its patents with UnixWare, OpenServer, SCO Manager and Reliant. IBM's attorney David Marriott could not be reached for comment Monday, but the company maintained in its motion to withdraw that patent infringement occurred.

SCO representatives did not return calls for comment Monday.

IBM is still countersuing on a dozen counts, claiming SCO breached a contract. That suit was field after SCO sued IBM two years ago. SCO claimed in an earlier lawsuit that IBM violated a mutual a agreement by putting parts of SCO's Unix operating system source code into Linux code. Linux is freely distributed, accessed and modified under open source.

IBM's most recent move could speed up the countersuit because it has already limited the amount of information SCO can obtain through legal discovery. That could save IBM time and money.