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SCO Sues End Users in Battle for LINUX Rights
SCO sued end users for the first time in its battle over LINUX by initiating suits against AutoZone, Inc. and Daimler Chrysler AG. The battle over LINUX, an open source operating system, began when SCO, inheritor of UNIX copyrights from the breakup of AT&T, accused IBM of distributing confidential UNIX code into the open source LINUX community. SCO previously initiated lawsuits against IBM, Novell, and Red Hat for contributing to and distributing the allegedly infringing LINUX. Last year, SCO sent letters to LINUX end users, alerting them to the potential liability of continuing to use LINUX without a license to SCO's intellectual property rights. However, few major companies have requested licenses, with the exceptions of Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, fueling speculation that Microsoft is funding SCO's legal battles.
SCO filed a copyright infringement suit against AutoZone in federal court in Nevada, alleging that AutoZone ran versions of LINUX that contained proprietary UNIX code without permission. In contrast, SCO sued Daimler Chrysler AG in Michigan state court for breach of contract, alleging that by using LINUX to run virtual test crashes, Chrysler used UNIX code outside the scope of a license Chrysler had for UNIX. SCO further alleges that Chrysler breached the agreement by contributing UNIX proprietary source code to LINUX. The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), a group devoted to promoting open source software, will make its $10 million legal fund available to all SCO targets, including AutoZone and Chrysler. OSDL has advised most end users to wait to see how the cases involving IBM, Novell and RedHat turn out before they begin requesting licenses.
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