I have been given a copy of an article, supposedly to run in the Wall Street Journal tomorrow, which reports that Caldera Systems (which now does business as the SCO group) has filed suit agaist IBM for multibillion-dollar damages over supposed disclosure of SCO's intellectual property to what SCO calls the “free software community”.
IBM has been selling Unix systems since the early 1980s. SCO bought the original Unix source-code tree and associated IPR from Novell in 1995. It is not, apparently, alleged that any of the infringing techology was developed on SCO's watch. Rather, the theory of the lawsuit is that “IBM made concentrated efforts to improperly destroy the economic value of Unix, particularly Unix on Intel, to benefit IBM's new Linux services business.”. SCO claims that Linux wasn't a viable competitor to SCO Unix until IBM started supporting Linux and assigning its programmers to improving it, and that parts of the licensed Unix have been shared with the Linux community.