SCO Tries Its Extortion Tactics on Google
SCO Group Inc., the software company that is suing IBM and extracting royalties from other Linux users, said on Friday that it had held "low-level talks" with Internet search engine Google about a license agreement.
"Certainly if they"re using 10,000 Linux servers that include our intellectual property as part of Unix , we would want them to license," said Blake Stowell, a SCO spokesman.
Lindon, Utah-based SCO claims that parts of Linux were directly copied from Unix, which SCO owns.
SCO sued International Business Machines Corp. last year and sent notice to thousands of companies to pay to use Linux. SCO said it now has Unix license agreements with more than 6,000 companies.
Stowell said that SCO has had "intermittent, low-level discussions" with Google, which is well-known for harnessing Linux technology to run its popular search service.