SCO targets government labs

Lindon-based SCO Group Inc., which is seeking billions in royalties from users of the Linux computer operating system, including International Business Machines Corp., is threatening legal action against two U.S. government research laboratories.

The Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center were sent letters by SCO Group in December and January, said Blake Stowell, a spokesman for SCO.

SCO says the Linux operating system, which backers tout as a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows, contains code from Unix, which SCO says it owns. The company's claims will be difficult to prove, according to legal experts.

"They have to prove the version of Linux that the Department of Energy is using contains code they wrote," said Tom Carey, a partner with the law firm Bromberg & Sunstein in Boston. "It's going to be a tedious and lengthy process."

Earlier this month, SCO filed suit against DaimlerChrysler Corp. and AutoZone Inc. over Linux. Last year, SCO sued IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y., seeking as much as $50 billion.

SCO chief executive Darl McBride has compared Linux users to cattle thieves and people who illegally download music from the Internet. He sent out letters earlier this year to Linux users, including the government laboratories, demanding that they purchase a license.

"They received letters along with hundreds of other Linux end users," SCO's Stowell said. "I am not aware of any communications that have taken place since those letters were sent."

Federal Computer Week, a trade publication, reported earlier Tuesday on the letters on its Web site. Joe Davis, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington, couldn't immediately be reached for comment.

Shares of SCO Group fell 56 cents, or 6.7 percent, to close at $7.77 Tuesday on Nasdaq. They have dropped 54 percent this year after climbing more than tenfold last year.