San Jose (California), Aug 08: International Business Machines Corp. has retaliated in court against claims by the SCO Group Inc. That it gave away proprietary code to developers of the Linux Operating System. IBM sought dismissal of SCO's original suit, alleging that the utah company made false allegations, competed unfairly and infringed on ibm patents. The countersuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. SCO claims to own the rights to key elements of the Unix Operating System, which has been licensed to thousands of companies, including IBM.

In an USD 3 billion suit it filed against IBM in March, SCO alleges that IBM transferred code from its AIX version of Unix to Linux, which is developed by thousands of programmers worldwide.

In the 45-page filing in Utah Federal Court, IBM asserts SCO devised a "campaign of falsehoods" that creates "the false impression that SCO holds the rights to Unix that permit it to control not only all Unix technology but also Linux."
IBM also accuses SCO of violating the gnu general public license under which Linux is distributed.

In June, SCO terminated the Unix license of IBM, which maintains the license is perpetual and continues to sell machines that run both Unix and Linux.
IBM also takes issue with SCO's attempts to generate licensing revenue based on alleged infringing code, which SCO has refused to publicly identify.

Bureau Report