S CO is stepping up its campaign to collect fees from users of Linux: According a New York Times report, SCO sent a second letter to companies that use Linux on Friday, December 19, 2003. The letter claimed that Linux users were illegally using SCOis intellectual property, and that SCO was willing to discuss options for remediation. From the New York Times article, SCO Sends Second Warning Letter to Linux Users:
The SCO Group plans to announce today that it is escalating its campaign to collect license fees from corporations using the Linux operating system, with warning letters to the companies. Supporters of Linux, including I.B.M. and other companies, say that SCOis interpretation of its claim over Linux is exaggerated.
The letters, dated Friday, are the second round that SCO has sent to corporate users of Linux. SCO sent letters to 1,500 companies in May, warning them that it contended that Linux had violated its intellectual property rights. SCO owns the rights to the Unix operating system. The company asserts that Linux, a variant of Unix that is distributed free, violates SCOis license and copyright.
The new letters, signed by Ryan E. Tibbitts, SCOis general counsel, name more than 65 programming files that "have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted Unix code base and contributed to Linux."
The letters focus on application binary interfaces, the programming hooks by which a software application gains access to the underlying operating system. "We believe these violations are serious, and we will take appropriate actions to protect our rights," the letters state.
Read the full account at the New York Times Web site. There, you can also view SCOis letter, which lists some of the claimed offending code.