Update: IBM files countersuit against SCO

IDG News Service - IBM has fired back at The SCO Group Inc. with a lawsuit filed late yesterday asserting that SCO is in violation of the license that governs contributions to the Linux operating system and that SCO has infringed upon IBM patents, an IBM spokesman said today.
In the lawsuit, filed in Utah, IBM claims that SCO has violated the General Public License (GPL) that regulates how the Linux operating system can be used. IBM is also alleging that SCO is violating four IBM patents with some of its products, the spokesman said.
"These counterclaims arise from SCO's efforts to wrongly assert proprietary rights over important, widely used technology and to impede the use of that technology by the open-source community," IBM said in the complaint. "SCO has misused, and is misusing, its purported rights to the Unix operating system developed initially by Bell Laboratories, then a research and development arm of AT&T Corp., to threaten destruction of the competing operating systems known as AIX and Linux, and to extract windfall profits for its unjust enrichment."
SCO, in Lindon, Utah, plans to release a statement later today, and had expected IBM to file its countersuit, a SCO spokesman said.
SCO initially filed a suit against IBM in March claiming that IBM has tried to undermine the Unix operating system, the rights to which are owned by SCO, with its Linux development efforts. That suit initially sought $1 billion in damages, a figure that has since risen to $3 billion.
SCO has falsely asserted that it has the right to revoke IBM's Unix license, IBM's complaint said. SCO announced in June that it was terminating IBM's AIX license and would seek compensation from IBM's AIX business. AIX is a version of Unix developed by IBM.
Novell Inc. sold certain Unix System V rights that it had acquired from AT&T to The Santa Cruz Operation Inc. in 1995, but it didn't give that company the right to revoke Unix licenses, IBM said. SCO, formerly known as Caldera Inc., bought the Unix rights in question in 2001 when it acquired some assets of The Santa Cruz Operation.
Those Unix rights didn't include the right to revoke IBM's license, which is described as "perpetual and irrevocable" in the complaint, according to Novell and IBM. IBM attached letters from Novell to SCO in June to support its claims.
Earlier this week, SCO announced that it will attempt to collect licensing fees from Linux users, charging companies $699 per processor for the license. That figure will rise to $1,399 per processor later this year.
The SCO Intellectual Property License for Linux lets Linux users run SCO's intellectual property in binary form only, the company said (see story).
IBM's lawsuit came two days after a similar complaint was filed against SCO by Red Hat Inc. (see story).
By attempting to claim licensing fees on Linux, SCO is in violation of the GPL, IBM said. It also said that SCO agreed not to seek such fees on any software distributed under the GPL when it distributed its own Linux products under that license using source code developed by IBM.
The patent-infringement charges center around four SCO products, UnixWare, Open Server, SCO Manager and Reliant HA, IBM said. SCO infringed four separate IBM patents with those products and should be enjoined from developing or selling those products, IBM claimed.
The patents that are being infringed, according to IBM, include a patent called Data Compression Method; one called Method of Navigating Among Program Menus Using a Graphical Menu Tree; one called Self-Verifying Receipt and Acceptance System for Electronically Delivered Data Objects; and Method for Monitoring and Recovery of Subsystems in a Distributed/Clustered System.
The challenge to SCO's licensing and legal maneuvers appears to have the support of at least some Linux users. Several users at the LinuxWorld show this week in San Francisco applauded Red Hat's action (see story). Those comments came before news of the IBM suit emerged.
Computerworld's Ken Mingis, and Robert McMillan, of the IDG News Service, contributed to this report.