SCO keeps the litigious hat with Novell

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 2 Jun 2003 at 12:13

In a teleconference on Friday, SCO refuted Novell's claimed ownership of Unix copyrights and patents, with CEO Darl McBride saying: 'We'll be settling these issues in court'.

Novell's assertion that the 1995 sale of Unix to SCO did not include the transfer of copyrights and patents is wrong, claimed McBride - a former executive at Novell. He described Novell's actions as 'a desperate measure to curry favour with the Linux fraternity', and that its statement was deliberately timed to tarnish SCO's quarterly results announcements.

McBride asserted that under the terms of the 1995 contract, 'the reach of SCO is broad and deep': that SCO 'owns all rights to the source code', 'all claims', 'all licensing agreements and sub-licensing agreements' and that the obligations of licencees 'extend beyond the use of source code to derivative works'.

In short, SCO's position is that the contractual intent was for SCO to own every aspect of the Unix operating system. Even so, none of the terms he read out specifically related to copyrights and patents. He concurred with Novell's claim that he had approached the company to fill this hole in the contract, but that this was an issue of 'clarification' rather than a request - SCO was not interested in purchasing something it believes it already owns.

To wit, he said that while the current suit with IBM is all about contracts, 'we do not rule out subsequent action based on copyright.'

Novell responded on Friday: 'We believe that SCO's statements are just another example of the fear, uncertainty and doubt about Linux that they are endeavoring to spread in the marketplace'

McBride said that the Unix code SCO alleges to have been misappropriated into Linux would soon be on view. 'We will be sharing code next week... we'll be sharing direct lines of code within Linux, plus derivative code... It's not just a couple of lines, we're going to show hundreds of lines of code.'

He added the company believed it could and fully intended to terminate IBM's AIX contract on 13 June. 'June is the month of show and tell,' he said.

The issue on which McBride singularly failed to answer, even when directly questioned, was what would happen to SCO if the company lost its suit against IBM - a company which he had said in an interview with CRN would blacken the Utah skies with lawyers.