The SCO Group plans to announce Monday that it is escalating its campaign to collect license fees from corporations using the Linux operating system, with warning letters to the companies. Supporters of Linux, including IBM and other companies, say that SCO"s interpretation of its claim over Linux is exaggerated.
The letters, dated Friday, are the second round that SCO has sent to corporate users of Linux. SCO sent letters to 1,500 companies in May, warning them that it contended that Linux had violated its intellectual property rights. SCO owns the rights to the Unix operating system. The company asserts that Linux, a variant of Unix that is distributed free, violates SCO"s license and copyright.
The new letters, signed by Ryan E. Tibbitts, SCO"s general counsel, name more than 65 programming files that "have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted Unix code base and contributed to Linux." The letters focus on application binary interfaces, the programming hooks by which a software application gains access to the underlying operating system. "We believe these violations are serious, and we will take appropriate actions to protect our rights," the letters state.