SCO Asks Court to Dismiss Red Hat Suit

SCO Group took a shot at Red Hat
Monday, filing a motion to
dismiss the lawsuit the Linux company initiated
against the Unix company in August.

SCO based its motion to dismiss — filed in a U.S.
District Court in Delaware — reportedly on the
claim that it has not specifically targeted Red Hat
in its ongoing campaign to prove that Linux is an
unauthorized derivative of its Unix operating system.

Red Hat told internetnews.com it has not yet
seen the filing, and is not prepared to comment.

SCO whipped up a storm of controversy in the Unix
and Linux industries with its claims that versions
2.4 and later of the Linux kernel — the versions
largely geared to enterprise deployments of Linux —
contain substantial amounts of copied and derivative
Unix code.


Its first action was to launch a multi-billion
dollar lawsuit
against IBM ,
which it claims broached a contract with SCO by
releasing portions of its AIX source code to the
open source community. SCO claims the AIX code is a
derivative work of Unix and thus could not be released.

Since then, SCO has received
U.S. copyright registrations for its Unix System V
and UnixWare source code, which legal experts say is
usually a signal that a firm is preparing to pursue
copyright litigation.


In August, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik said the
company decided to launch its suit against SCO after
it was directly mentioned in a SCO conference call
concerning its claims about Linux, in which he said
SCO strived to create an “atmosphere of fear, doubt
and uncertainty about Linux.”

“We filed this complaint to stop SCO from making
unsubstantiated and untrue public statements
attacking Red Hat Linux and the integrity of the
Open Source software development process,” Red Hat
General Counsel Mark Webbink said in a statement at
the time. “Red Hat is confident that its current and
future customers will continue to realize the
significant value that our Red Hat Linux platform
provides without interruption.”

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