After a few months of attempting to convince US-based Linux users to give it money in the guise of licensing fees, the SCO Group has decided to expand its campaign of demanding money before proving any is owed. The company has decided to include European Linux users, according to an article at InternetNews.com. At first, the company will seek to extract funds from users in the UK, France, and Italy, and will expand into other areas by the 1st of February. From InternetNews.com:
The maneuver is the Linden, Utah-based companyis latest tactic to assert copyright over parts of the free operating system that it claims came from parts of the UNIX operating system code it claims to own. When it filed its now-$3 billion suit against IBM (Quote, Chart) back in March 2003, SCO claimed that Big Blue let SCOis copyrighted UNIX code slip into the open source operating system. The case is expected to go to trial by 2005. In the meantime, SCO said it wants Linux users to pay up anyway.
SCO said its license grants end-users permission to use its intellectual property "in binary form only, as contained in Linux distributions," SCO said. "By purchasing the license, customers are properly compensating SCO for the UNIX source code, derivative UNIX code and other UNIX-related intellectual property and copyrights owned by SCO as it is currently found in Linux."
Right now, the arrangement is to roll the licensing plan out to companies in the U.K., France and Italy, with other European countries to follow by Feb. 1, Blake Stowell, SCO Groupis spokesman told internetnews.com.
The company has sent similar offers out to U.S. based companies within the Fortune 1000 that use Linux, asserting that it is due licensing fees for code in the operating system. In November, SCO Group also served notice that it intends to expand its dispute and sue U.S.-based end-users of the Linux operating system -- if users donit pay license fees.
You can read the full article at InternetNews.comis Web site.