I t shouldnit be a surprise to anyone that SCO is at it again, nor should SCOis new target be much of a surprise. According to an article at ZDNet, SCO is planning to pull Silicon Graphicsi Unix license, used by that company for its IRIX operating system. The news comes from an SEC filing from SGI that says the license may be pulled on October 14th of this year. SCO is claiming that some of its Unix code was contributed to the Linux kernel by SGI, and that SGIis XFS filesystem is a derivative of Unix. For its part, SGI believes its Unix license to be paid in full and nonterminable, and finds SCOis allegations without merit. From ZDNet:
"We have received a letter from SCO Group alleging that, as a result of our activities related to the Linux operating system, we are in breach of the fully paid license under which we distribute our Irix operating system," the SGI filing said. "The letter purports to terminate our Unix System V license effective Oct. 14, 2003. We believe that the SCO Groupis allegations are without merit and that our fully paid license is nonterminable. There can be no assurance that this dispute with SCO Group will not escalate into litigation."
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SCO executives singled out SGIis XFS file system software for Linux during an August presentation in which they identified potentially infringing Linux elements.
SCOis letter doesnit mention any specific pieces of software. It says that by contributing to unspecified software products, "SGI flagrantly permitted the copying and use of our proprietary information."
Greg Estes, vice president of corporate marketing for SGI, said the SCO letter was vague and wasnit followed by any attempt to discuss the issues.
SGI has admitted to finding some Unix code that was inadvertently added to the Linux kernel, but according to an open letter to the Linux community, it has all been removed, and that "better replacements providing the same functionality [were] already available in the Linux kernel." In addition, "most or all" of the under 200 lines of code out of the over a million contributed to the Linux kernel by SGI had previously been in the public domain.
You can read the full article at ZDNetis Web site.