SCO revokes IBM Unix licence

SCO claims to have revoked IBM's Unix licence in its ongoing battle to squeeze cash out of its claimed Unix rights.

And it is asking for an injunction to stop IBM's AIX sales. Big Blue sold $3.6bn worth of Unix servers last year. The war of words continues outside the courtroom.

"We have terminated IBM's right to use AIX in their business, development, distribution and sales," said Chris Sontag, head of the SCOsource effort to derive more revenue from the company's Unix intellectual property. And in an amendment to the company's March complaint against IBM, SCO is "seeking a permanent injunction from IBM's continued use of our software in their business."

Also in the amended suit, SCO said that it owns the copyrights to Unix and criticized the practices of Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds. "A significant flaw of Linux is the inability and/or unwillingness of the Linux process manager, Linus Torvalds, to identify the intellectual-property origins of contributed source code that comes in from those many different software developers" who contribute to Linux, the suit said.

IBM maintains that it has done nothing wrong, that its license to sell Unix products is still valid, and that its customers need not worry that they no longer have a license to use AIX, said spokesman Mike Fay, vice president of communications for IBM's systems group. "Our Unix license is irrevocable, perpetual and fully paid up. It can't be terminated," Fay said.

Despite the harsh rhetoric, the fact that SCO is seeking a permanent rather than preliminary injunction means that the issue won't be resolved soon and customers need not worry, said Daniel Harris, an intellectual-property attorney with Clifford Chance. "There isn't going to be any practical impact now," Harris said. "Unless they seek a preliminary injunction, there's no (court) order impacting IBM or IBM's customers."

In a statement, IBM said it will stand behind its products and customers, but raised an intellectual-property issue that SCO so far has skirted: patents. "IBM will continue to ship, support and develop AIX, which represents years of IBM innovation, hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and many patents," IBM said.

The seeds of SCO's dispute were sowed several years ago. Unix and AIX has a long and twisted history. In 1995, Novell sold SCO Unix copyrights and contracts with many large companies, including Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Compaq Computer.

Though those licenses lay largely dormant for years, SCO decided that they could be a source of revenue that could bolster the struggling company's fortunes after its failure to make a business of selling Linux.

SCO in March sued IBM for more than $1 billion, alleging that Big Blue had violated its contract with SCO by misappropriating Unix trade secrets it had built into Linux. SCO then found Unix code that it says was copied directly into Linux and has said it will sue others as well. IBM licensed Unix from AT&T in the 1980s, and SCO--formerly called Caldera Systems and Caldera International--bought that contract in 2001. IBM was permitted to build on that Unix technology, but SCO argues that IBM violated its contract by transferring some of those modifications to Linux.

Stephen Shankland writes for news.com