SCO to enforce its intellectual property in Linux world

Linux and Unix users and vendors beware: The SCO Group has hired high-voltage attorney David Boies, former antitrust Microsoft slayer, to look into possible violations of SCO’s Unix and Linux intellectual property, it said Wednesday.

Linux and Unix users and vendors beware: The SCO Group has hired high-voltage attorney David Boies, former antitrust Microsoft slayer, to look into possible violations of SCO’s Unix and Linux intellectual property, it said Wednesday.

Along these lines, SCO has also created a new division entrusted with managing the company’s intellectual property assets, an area over which the company says it wants to keep tighter controls.

The idea is for the company to be “a little bit more aggressive than we have been in the past at enforcing our intellectual property,” said Chris Sontag, senior vice president of SCO’s operating systems division, in an interview Wednesday.

“We’re doing more research than we have in the past to make sure the use of our intellectual property is appropriate… which hasn’t been done in a few years,” he added.

In Wednesday’s statement, Lindon, Utah-based SCO claims it is “the majority owner of Unix intellectual property” and that although Linux is open source software, “it shares philosophy, architecture and APIs (application programming interfaces) with Unix.” Thus, SCO’s licensing push, which involves launching new licensing programs, will be geared towards making sure that users and vendors combine Linux and Unix technology “legitimately,” the statement said.

The company’s CEO Darl McBride was quoted in the statement as saying that “SCO owns much of the core Unix intellectual property, and has full rights to license this technology and enforce the associated patents and copyrights.”

“In some cases, people may have unknowingly assumed (our intellectual property) was in the public domain,” Sontag said, adding that it is SCO’s intention to make its licensing programs “reasonable.”

SCO, formerly known as Caldera International, claims its Unix patents, copyrights and core technology date from 1969 when Bell Laboratories created the Unix source code.

The new licensing division, called SCOsource, will be aided in its efforts by Boies and his law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner. Boies gained notoriety in the IT world when he served as special trial counsel for the U.S. Department of Justice in its antitrust suit against Microsoft. He was front and center in the effort that culminated with the historic judicial decision in November 1999 that Microsoft had abused its monopoly power in the market for PC operating systems.

The first new licensing program launched by the licensing division is the SCO System V for Linux, which will provide access to SCO’s Unix System Shared Libraries for use with Linux to application developers, operating system vendors, end users and hardware and services providers, SCO said. Previously, these Unix libraries couldn’t be used outside of the SCO operating systems, but now licensees will be able to license the entire SCO operating systems to use these libraries, SCO said. Other SCO licensing programs are in the works.