Red Hat strikes back

Last week, we wrote that SCO's anti-Linux campaign was not just IBM's problem, and that others needed to get into the fight. Red Hat, clearly, was thinking along the same lines; on August 4 the company announced the filing of a lawsuit against SCO in U.S. District Court in Delaware. Also announced was the creation of a fund (with a $1 million contribution from Red Hat) to defend Linux developers against infringement suits. Red Hat, seeing a threat to its business, decided to act. SCO, indeed, is not just IBM's problem.

The lawsuit alleges unfair competition, trade libel, deceptive trade practices, false advertising, and interference with business opportunities. It asks for a declaratory judgement that Red Hat has not violated SCO's copyright or trade secrets, and asks for an unspecified amount of damages. LWN has published a look at Red Hat's complaint; for those wanting to go to the source, the complaint itself is available in small, easily-read text format or huge, hard-to-read PDF format.

There is one interesting omission from the complaint. SCO continues to distribute a 2.4 kernel. This action is a clear violation of the GPL (SCO claims that kernel cannot be redistributed, or even run without a special license - see below), and thus an infringement of the kernel developers' copyrights. Red Hat (along with its employees) holds copyrights to a substantial amount of kernel code, but no allegations of infringement appear in Red Hat's complaint. Red Hat told us it was "unable to comment" about this omission. The GPL and SCO's continued distribution of the disputed code (whatever it is) under a GPL license will almost certainly play a role in this whole affair before it is done, but the time has apparently not yet come.

SCO's response to Red Hat's suit was unyielding, to say the least.

The response includes a letter sent back to Red Hat; quoting from there:

Remember, as you read the above, that SCO "has not been trying to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt."

If things go well, Red Hat's suit has the potential to force SCO to put its cards on the table and point out the code that, it claims, infringes upon its copyrights. At that point, it would be possible to actually evaluate those claims and determine the true origins of the disputed code. If SCO has no real claim to that code, the issue can be put to rest. If SCO's copyrights have truly been violated, the parties responsible can be identified and the stolen code excised. Of course, SCO has no interest in either of those scenerios, and will continue to fight any sort of public disclosure. It would not be possible, after all, for SCO to try to collect a tax on a system known to be free of its copyrights. But that's the subject for the next article...

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