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.
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