Utah's David vs. Goliath tech battle hotter after last week

Utah's own version of the David-and-Goliath technology war got ratcheted up a couple of notches last week.

Novell strengthened its Linux presence, The SCO Group (Nasdaq: SCOX) was attacked in court, SCO said "pay up," IBM countersued SCO, SCO said IBM was a copycat and stupid to boot, and a securities analyst stated SCO's claims of copied code may be correct.

Interesting, huh?

The week began somewhat inauspiciously with Novell (Nasdaq: NOVL) announcing on Monday that it had acquired privately held Ximian, a Boston-based firm whose software is used to manage the various applications and variants of Linux running on Linux-based computers and networks.

This is an interesting development for Novell, as it has made very strong moves in the past six to 12 months to support the growing Linux movement.

This is also interesting in that Novell is in the midst of a legal spat with SCO over who owns UNIX, the enterprise operating system originally developed at AT&T that at one time was owned by Novell but is owned today by SCO.

Not only is SCO spatting with the larger Novell, it also is spatting with the even-larger IBM.

Then later in the day, word got out that North Carolina-based Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) had filed a multipart complaint against SCO asking the U.S. District Court in Delaware to issue a declaratory judgment that Red Hat has not violated any SCO copyrights.

The court also was asked to prevent SCO from making any further claims against Red Hat.

According to numerous news reports, Red Hat CEO Matt Szulik claimed the leading distributor of Linux software and services had taken this step to protect its customers and prevent "unsubstantiated rumors" against it.

SCO fired back by the end of the day with a statement alleging SCO had been involved in behind-the-scenes discussions with RHAT as recently as July 31 trying to "resolve the issues between our companies short of litigation."

The statement, which included copies of two letters sent to Red Hat by SCO, also explained that it is likely SCO will issue legal "counterclaims (against RHAT) for copyright infringement and conspiracy."

Not bad for one day, but the week had barely begun.

On Tuesday, SCO unveiled a licensing program targeting corporate users running Linux on their computers, particularly those versions known as Linux 2.4 and 2.5.