SCO reveals unlucky Linux users

SCO has officially announced the company on the receiving end of its lawsuit – the US' largest car-parts seller, Autozone – alleging the business is violating its intellectual property by running the Linux operating system.

The suit, filed in the US district court in Nevada, demands that AutoZone stops running Linux and pay as-yet-unspecified damages.

SCO announced back in January that it would be going after a Linux user as well as its pursing its suit against IBM over the alleged copyright infringement of Unix, setting a deadline of the middle of February to name the unlucky party.

The slipped deadline – which is probably unrelated to the fact that SCO only opened its Linux licence shop and named a company to actually pay for one such licence within the last week – wasn't mentioned by CEO Darl McBride in the company's quarterly conference today.

He did say, however, that SCO's case was the equivalent of the RIAA's lawsuits against illegal downloaders and hoped that the legal actions would highlight the copyright issue to "users who haven't considered the ramifications." It's not the first time SCO and the RIAA have drawn parallels – SCO's website was downed by a denial of service resulting from the MyDoom virus in January, with a similar attack being launched on the RIAA last month.

Clive Longbottom, service director at analyst house Quocirca, said that he thought the announcement was purely an attempt to "frighten people into paying for a licence... it's the worst kind of FUD from a company that shouldn’t even be in existence," he told silicon.com. "This is putting pressure on people to buy the licences and the uptake so far hasn't been overwhelming... It's not in anyone's interest, including the shareholders'. It's more in Darl's interest – his pension fund has to come from somewhere."

And McBride was making no secret today of what he hopes to gain from the lawsuit, saying that SCO will see "increasing revenue from the initiative" in the coming quarters and reiterated the company's commitment to "rigorously enforce [SCO's] intellectual property."

The furore doesn't seem to bolstering the SCO purse much, however. SCO's revenue for the first quarter of this year was reported at $11.4m – the corresponding quarter of 2004 turned up revenue $13.5m.

Whether or not the suit will actually trouble end users is still open to debate. Novell and Red Hat have indemnified users against any possible legal action and Longbottom believes that IBM would be more than happy to help out any big-hitting Linux users who wanted a licence. "If one of IBM's big customers rings up and says we need six licences at $795 each, I'm sure they'll have a whip round in the office," he said.

SCO's lawyers have another reason to be smiling today. SCO said today that it has spent $3.4m on legal fees this year and has also launched another case against car manufacturer Daimler Chrysler for alleged breach of its Unix software agreement after the company "failed to respond appropriately" to SCO's requests.

This isn't the end of the legal action, according to McBride. SCO will be taking further steps "in the US and around the globe," he said.