In The SCO Group Inc."s latest U.S. District Court filing as it battles IBM over Linux, the company is no longer using the affirmative defense that the GNU General Public License (GPL) is unconstitutional. SCO president and CEO Darl McBride took aim at the GNU General Public License, under which Linux is distributed, in a December open letter. He said the GPL violates the U.S. Constitution as well as U.S. copyright and patent laws.
Moreover, a subsequent letter sent to U.S. elected officials expanded on SCO"s vision of the GPL. McBride declared that open-source software is a threat to the country"s IT industry, to national security and to the ability of the country to compete in the global economic market. "I urge you to consider the other side because I believe that open source, as it is currently constituted, is a slippery slope," McBride wrote to legislators in January. "It undermines our basic system of intellectual property rights, and it destroys the economic reason for innovation.