Red Hat escalated the legal war over Linux on Monday by announcing it has filed suit against the SCO Group. The legal strategy, announced on the first day of LinuxWorld Conference and Expo taking place in San Francisco, will likely be welcomed by the open-source community. Lindon, Utah-based SCO asserts that some of the underlying code in Linux was unlawfully copied from Unix, the decades-old operating system to which SCO claims some intellectual property rights.
Earlier this year, SCO filed a billion-dollar suit against IBM for alleged copying of its proprietary Unix intellectual property into Linux. It has also sent letters to about 1,500 Linux customers, warning that they may be infringing on SCO"s intellectual property. Red Hat called SCO"s actions "unfair and deceptive" and stated that Red Hat"s software does not infringe upon any of SCO"s intellectual property.
"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," Mark Webbink, Red Hat"s general counsel, said in a prepared statement. "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." Red Hat filed the complaint in the U.S. District Court of Delaware. Additional details were not immediately available.