Linux seller Red Hat, tangled in a legal wrestling match with the SCO Group, has hired a new top lawyer from IBM.
Michael Cunningham, who will join Red Hat on June 1, previously was associate general counsel for IBM"s Business Consulting Services Division in Europe. In the new post at Red Hat, he"ll be working at a company that has launched its own legal attack against SCO and that is a champion of some unconventional notions about intellectual property. Red Hat"s current general counsel, Mark Webbink, will become Cunningham"s deputy specializing in intellectual property and public policy issues.
Open-source software is created by programmers who cooperate by sharing software freely, a contrast to traditional proprietary software methods in which a program"s underlying source code is kept secret. With SCO"s case, which
alleges that Linux infringes SCO"s Unix copyrights, the intersection of intellectual property law and open-source software has been getting more attention. To assuage potential customer legal concerns with using Linux and open-source applications, Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat offers a warranty that promises to replace any software found to violate another"s copyrights. Novell and Hewlett-Packard have taken a different route, offering indemnification, which means they"ll reimburse their Linux customers for a certain amount of their legal bills if sued.