
News in brief
Published: 14 November 2003 08:50 GMT
The Open Source Development Lab will pay its law firm to represent Linus Torvalds, the Linux operating system founder and leader who this week was subpoenaed in connection with a $3bn lawsuit against IBM.
OSDL is Torvalds' employer and a consortium set up to improve the open source operating system. The lab is funded by Cisco, Computer Associates, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi, IBM, Nokia, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems and many other significant computing industry companies.
"OSDL has agreed to fund legal representation for Torvalds and any other employees of the lab who may become involved in the litigation," the consortium said in a statement it plans to release today.
SCO Group, owner of key Unix copyrights, sued IBM in March, alleging that Big Blue transferred technology from proprietary Unix to open source Linux against the terms of its contract with SCO. The suit has expanded significantly: SCO now seeks at least $3bn in damages and has launched a frontal assault on the General Public License (GPL) that governs Linux.
IBM has denied the allegations and launched its own countersuit, including four patent-infringement claims. Top Linux seller Red Hat has jumped into the fray with a suit of its own against SCO seeking to put the matter to rest as quickly as possible.
SCO subpoenaed Torvalds and OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen on Wednesday in the case. The two will be represented by the AterWynne law firm.
Also requested to provide legal information were John Horsley, CEO of Torvalds' former employer Transmeta, and Richard Stallman, who is founder of the Free Software Foundation, creator of the GPL, and the man whose GNU's Not Unix project provided the intellectual and technological framework for Linux.
Red Hat RHCE Certification Strong knowledge of Red Hat RHEL 5, , , Slackware, Solaris Unix/Linux distributions CentOS Our client a fantastic IT ...
Work for a recognised internationally leading global company as a Senior UNIX Systems Administrator. Based in the UK but focused at a Global level, ...
Business Systems Be responsible for diagnosing and following through to resolution any problems, escalating to other teams and vendors when required ...
Agenda Setters 2009
Welcome to the ninth annual Agenda Setters poll – silicon.com's list of the top 50 most influential individuals in the technology and IT industries, from techies and CIOs to entrepreneurs and business leaders. Find out more in our latest special report.
Stories from the web...
Copyright © 2008 CBS Interactive Limited. All rights reserved. Top of page
Clive Longbottom Windows 7: Not perfect - but ready for prime time Microsoft's latest OS fixes most of Vista's ills - but still has challenges ahead
Stephen Kleynhans Mind the details with Windows 7 Just because it might work better than Vista, it doesn't mean you can be sloppy