The SCO Group, Inc. today made the following announcement:
On Friday, September 26, IBM filed an amendment to its legal
complaint against The SCO Group. In this amended complaint IBM
asserts that SCO has violated the GNU General Public License (GPL),
and based on this violation has then violated certain IBM
copyrights. IBM, not SCO, has brought the GPL into the legal
controversy between the two companies. SCO believes that the GPL —
created by the Free Software Foundation to supplant current U.S.
copyright laws — is a shaky foundation on which to build a legal
case. By contrast, SCO continues to base its legal claims on
well-settled United States contract laws and United States
copyright laws.
The GPL has never faced a full legal test, and SCO believes that
it will not stand up in court. We are confident that SCO will win
the legal battle that IBM has now started over the GPL. By so
strongly defending the controversial GPL, IBM is also defending a
questionable licensing scheme through which it can avoid providing
software indemnification for its customers. We continue to urge IBM
to provide legal indemnification for its Linux customers.