The war of words between The SCO Group Inc. and the Linux community escalated this week in a flurry of open letters, the latest from Linux creator Linus Torvalds. In a letter dated Tuesday, the maintainer of the Linux kernel dismissed an offer from SCO Chief Executive Officer Darl McBride to negotiate the dispute with the open-source community. "There doesn"t seem to be anything to negotiate about. SCO has yet to show any infringing IP (intellectual property) in the open-source domain," Torvalds wrote.
Torvalds also had a few sarcastic words for the Lindon, Utah-based SCO, noting that it is ironic that SCO acquired much of its capital from an initial public offering based on a Linux business model. "We have to sadly decline taking business model advice from a company that seems to have squandered all of its money ... and now seems to play the U.S. legal system like a lottery," he wrote SCO, which previously operated under the name Caldera Systems Inc., once operated as a Linux distributor. The company has seen its status in the open-source community plummet over the last year, however, as its anti-Linux rhetoric has increased.