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IBM has fired back at The SCO Group with a lawsuit filed late Wednesday asserting that SCO is violating the license that governs contributions to Linux and that SCO has infringed on IBM patents, an IBM spokesperson says.

In the lawsuit, filed in Utah, IBM claims SCO violates the General Public License that regulates how the Linux operating system can be used. IBM also alleges SCO is violating four IBM patents with some of its products, the spokesperson says.

Suit Specs

"These counterclaims arise from SCO's efforts to wrongly assert proprietary rights over important, widely used technology, and to impede the use of that technology by the open-source community. SCO has misused, and is misusing, its purported rights to the Unix operating system developed initially by Bell Laboratories, then a research and development arm of AT&T, to threaten destruction of the competing operating systems known as AIX and Linux, and to extract windfall profits for its unjust enrichment," IBM says in the complaint.

SCO plans to release a statement later. The company expected IBM to file a countersuit, an SCO spokesperson says.

SCO sued IBM in March, claiming IBM has tried to undermine the Unix operating system, to which SCO owns the rights, with its Linux development efforts.

The IBM complaint says that SCO falsely claims the right to revoke IBM's Unix license. In June, SCO said it was terminating IBM's AIX license and would seek compensation from IBM's AIX business. AIX is a version of Unix developed by IBM.

Novell sold certain Unix System V rights that it had acquired from AT&T to The Santa Cruz Operation in 1995, but did not grant that company the right to revoke Unix licenses, IBM says in its complaint. SCO, formerly known as Caldera, bought the Unix rights in question in 2001 when it acquired some assets of The Santa Cruz Operation.

Those rights do not allow SCO to revoke IBM's license, which IBM describes as "perpetual and irrevocable" in the complaint, according to Novell and IBM. In its complaint, IBM attached letters from Novell to SCO from June 2003 to support its claims.

Charging Users

SCO announced this week that it will try to collect licensing fees from Linux users. Its threat to do so earlier this summer was met with derision in the Linux community.

By trying to claim licensing fees for Linux, SCO violates the General Public License, IBM says. The company also claims SCO agreed not to seek such fees on any software distributed under the license when it distributed its own Linux products under that license, using source code developed by IBM.

The patent-infringement charges center around four SCO products: UnixWare, Open Server, SCO Manager, and Reliant HA, IBM says. SCO infringes four separate IBM patents with those products, and should not develop or sell those products, IBM claims.

According to IBM, the patents that are being infringed are "Data Compression Method," "Method of Navigating among Program Menus Using a Graphical Menu Tree," "Self-Verifying Receipt and Acceptance System for Electronically Delivered Data Objects," and "Method for Monitoring and Recovery of Subsystems in a Distributed/Clustered System."

Additional reporting by Robert McMillan of the IDG News Service.

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