SCO Plans Linux User Suit Tuesday
SCO plans to file the lawsuit against a company with a recognizable name and a Unix license from SCO or a previous owner of Unix, said company spokesman Blake Stowell. The lawsuit will likely be filed mid-day Pacific time on Tuesday.
Darl C. McBride, SCO president and chief executive officer, announced the lawsuit at the Software 2004 conference in San Francisco Stowell said.
"I'd love to be more specific," Stowell said, "but, unfortunately, I can't be. That news is being saved until Tuesday."
Mark Radcliffe, an intellectual property attorney with the firm Gray, Cary, Ware and Freidenrich, said SCO will have a difficult time scoring a quick win in a copyright infringement lawsuit, since the copyrights themselves are in dispute. Both SCO and Novell have claimed ownership to Linux copyrights, and SCO later sued Novell.
"The whole issue of the customer lawsuit may be put on hold, with the court saying they're going to wait until the lawsuit is resolved with Novell," Radcliffe said.
SCO said earlier Monday that the Houston-based hosting division of service provider Everyone's Internet has signed a site license that allows the use of SCO intellectual property in binary form for all of its Web servers running Linux.
EV1Servers manages more than 20,000 web servers, with the majority running Linux, Stowell said. The deal is worth "north of seven figures" to SCO, he said.
This story courtesy of TechWeb