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A news story on Client Server News alleging that Linux vendor SCO (erstwhile Caldera) was to hire high-profile lawyer David Boies to investigate revenue opportunities from its Unix patents appears to be true, despite the company shouting it down as entirely speculative.

Then at LinuxWorld Expo in New York today, SCO announced it would charge $149 per server processor for the use of its Unix libraries. SCO claims it owns patents on 'the core UNIX source code'.

A statement from SCO following the original story, barely a week ago, reads: 'Our Unix IP is a significant asset and for several months we have been holding internal discussions, exploring a wide range of possible strategies concerning this asset. We've reached

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no final decisions on any course of action.'

Additionally, the company says that it has now hired 'David Boies of the law firm Boies, Schiller and Flexner for research and protection of SCO's patents, copyrights and other intellectual property.'

In New York SCO announced it has created SCOsource, dedicated to expanding the licensing opportunities for its IP. It also announced it SCO System V program that licenses 'SCO's UNIX System shared libraries for use with UNIX applications, enabling them to run on Linux.'

However, the company would not deny that it may be looking farther afield for licensing revenues. This could affect operating systems from Microsoft and Apple's Unix-based Mac OS X as well as BSD versions of Unix.

Charging licence fees may also spell problems in its relationships with other Linux vendors, especially as the company operates the Caldera distribution of the OS, which contributes to the UnitedLinux project along with SuSE, TurboLinux and Conectiva.

Chris Sontag, Senior Vice President for Operating Systems and SCOsource, said: 'While Linux is an Open Source product, it shares philosophy, architecture and APIs with Unix... The most substantial intellectual property in Unix comes from SCO.'

The Unix code was developed at AT&T's Bell Labs in 1969.