Novell, SCO battling over Unix

Novell and the SCO Group are engaged in a war of words about control over the Unix computer operating system.

Novell's chairman, president and chief executive officer, Jack Messman, fired the first volley Wednesday, publicizing a letter he sent to Darl McBride, president and chief executive officer of SCO.

Messman said Provo-based Novell "challenged SCO's assertion it owns the copyrights and patents to Unix System V." He said an agreement between Novell and SCO in 1995 did not transfer those rights to SCO.

Lindon-based SCO shot back quickly. The company has contended that Unix intellectual property has been illegally included in open-source Linux software.

"SCO owns the contract rights to the Unix operating system. SCO has the contractual right to prevent improper donations of Unix code, methods or concepts into Linux by any Unix vendor," it said in a press release. "Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with. From a legal standpoint, contracts end up being far stronger than anything you could do with copyrights."

SCO has said it bought the rights to Unix in 1995 for $145 million from Novell, but Messman's letter claimed that "over the last few months, you have repeatedly asked Novell to transfer the copyrights to SCO, requests that Novell has rejected."

Novell bought Unix from AT&T Corp. in 1992.

Novell said it is defending its interests in developing products to operate on Linux. It recently announced an upcoming version of NetWare based on the Linux kernel, plus other collaboration and resource management products for Linux.

"Put simply, Novell is an ardent supporter of Linux and the open source development community," Messman wrote. "This support will increase over time."

Messman also wants SCO to "back up its assertions" that unnamed entities have copied into Linux some Unix System V code. Messman criticized a recent SCO letter sent to 1,500 companies as being vague, saying "the vagueness of your allegation is intentional." The SCO letter said "commercial users" may face legal liability for using Linux.

"SCO claims it has specific evidence supporting its allegations against the Linux community," Messman wrote. "It is time to substantiate that claim, or recant the sweeping and unsupported allegation made in your letter. Absent such action, it will be apparent to all that SCO's true intent is to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt about Linux in order to extort payments from Linux distributors and users."