"In 1995, SCO purchased the rights and ownership of UNIX and
UnixWare that had been originally owned by AT&T. This included
source code, source documentation, software development contracts,
licenses and other intellectual property that pertained to
UNIX-related business. SCO became the successor in interest to the
UNIX software licenses originally licensed by AT&T Bell
Laboratories to all UNIX distributors, including Hewlett-Packard
Co., IBM, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems Inc., and many
others.
"'SCO is in the enviable position of owning the UNIX operating
system,' said Darl McBride, president and CEO, SCO, in an interview
with eWeek Thursday. 'It is clear from our stand point that we have
an extremely compelling case against IBM. SCO has more than 30,000
contracts with UNIX licensees and upholding these contracts is as
important today as the day they were signed.'
"McBride said the bottom line was that SCO owned the source code
to Unix and the right to that operating system. IBM had taken AIX
and made it available to the Linux community in an unlawful
way..."
