SCO v. IBM
Brief by The SCO Group
August 31, 2016
"At that time, SCO dominated the market for businesses seeking UNIX- based operating systems to run on Intel processor-based hardware, a market IBM estimated to be worth $3 billion in 1998. Under the Project Monterey partnership, both parties would contribute code and expertise to develop an operating system that each could market and from which each would profit.
"Upon the general release of the jointly developed Project Monterey operating system, IBM and SCO would each obtain a license to the other’s code in the released Project Monterey operating system. The parties could then use the code in their respective proprietary operating systems – AIX for Power for IBM and UnixWare for SCO.
"IBM abandoned the partnership, however, and never released a generally available operating system. Knowing that its decision to abandon the project would mean not getting a license to SCO’s valuable code, IBM pretended to proceed with Project Monterey to induce SCO to contribute its code to the project’s development.
"IBM then took SCO’s code and used it in its own AIX for Power operating system – despite failing to meet the condition for obtaining a license to that code. IBM pretended to meet the condition by issuing a self-described non-working “sham release” of a Project Monterey system to give itself cover for stealing SCO’s code.
"Worse, IBM then used SCO’s code to improve Linux, an open-source operating system that, until then, was never reliable enough to compete with UNIX for the commercial server market. But once IBM used the code it had misappropriated from SCO, Linux was finally able to – and did – compete directly and successfully, greatly diminishing the UNIX-on-Intel market.
"Once SCO realized that its UNIX software had appeared in Linux, it approached Linux users about a licensing agreement and expressed its intention to protect its IP rights. IBM tried to coerce SCO not to do so.
"IBM’s misappropriation of code, threats, and advertisement of improvements in Linux grievously harmed SCO, which had offered to join forces with IBM to share specialized technological code and expertise toward what SCO had hoped would be a fruitful and fair partnership."
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Copyright 2016
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