After rattling the technology industry in North America, SCO Group is taking its show on the road this week.
A company spokesman confirmed Monday that CEO Darl McBride and other executives were en route to Japan, where they will spend the week explaining the SCO"s high-stakes legal battle against Linux to leaders of information technology companies. The Lindon, Utah-based company stunned the tech world earlier this year when it sued IBM, claiming Big Blue violated contracts governing the use of the underlying code for the Unix operating system, which SCO controls and licenses to most big tech firms. SCO claimed that source code underneath the open-source Linux operating system--of which IBM has been a major supporter--includes major segments copied from Unix. It eventually revoked IBM"s license to use Unix and upped its legal claim to $3 billion.
SCO later indicated it may expand the case, sending letters to technology executives at 1,500 large companies informing them that any use of Linux software could expose them to legal liability. While initial stages of the legal campaign have focused on IBM and a few other U.S.-based companies, many Asian-based firms have significant Linux investments and need to know about the issues, said Blake Stowell, director of corporate communications for SCO.
"I would say most of these companies...are well into a Linux strategy," he said. McBride will try to outline SCO"s position to Asian business leaders, many of whom already pay SCO to use Unix, Stowell said. "This trip is partly to explain to them our position with our current dealings with IBM," he said. "It"s also to see where we"re at, with them, in terms of the Unix license that many of them already have."