[PLUG] Using Linux is now illegal?

[Ed Sawicki]

Dear SCO Partner:

As a SCO Partner, we thank you for your support and continued business.
Because
you are a valued partner, it is important that we make you aware of
important
SCO business decisions and announcements as soon as possible. As such,
we wanted
to make you aware of an important announcement made today.

This communication is about recent efforts SCO has made to license and
protect
our patents, copyrights and intellectual property pertaining to the
UNIX(r)
operating system.  As you know, on March 7, 2003 SCO announced that it
filed
legal action against IBM in the State Court of Utah, for
misappropriation of
trade secrets, tortuous interference, unfair competition and breach of
contract.
The complaint alleged 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.

As we have progressed in our discovery related to this action, SCO has
found
compelling evidence that the Linux operating system contains
unauthorized SCO
UNIX intellectual property (IP).  Due to this discovery, we are taking
three
immediate courses of action. 

1 - The first is to send a letter alerting commercial users to the fact
that
legal liability for the use of Linux by businesses may extend to end
users.
Customers should start receiving this letter today. For your
information, a copy
of this letter may be found at:
http://www.sco.com/scosource/letter_to_linux_customers.html

2 - The second action we are taking is to suspend all future sales of
the Linux
operating system from SCO until the attendant risks with Linux are
better
understood and properly resolved. 

3 - Finally, although this action affects future development and sales
of SCO's
Linux offerings, SCO will continue to support our SCO Linux and
OpenLinux
customers and partners who have previously implemented those products
and we
will hold them harmless from any SCO intellectual property issues
regarding
Linux. SCO will continue to honor all contractual obligations with
existing
customers including product updates, service, and support.

As many of you are already aware, SCO UNIX systems continue to sell well
-
including an increase in OpenServer sales over the previous quarter. Our
UNIX
products continue to support many of the world's largest businesses. In
addition, new customer sales indicate that there is still no better
option for
rock-solid, dependable technology for their core businesses than our SCO
UNIX
solutions.

We are excited to be building on our SCO UNIX history as we roll out our
next
generation UNIX operating system and SCOx framework this fall. SCOx will
allow
small and medium business customers and branch offices to plug their
existing
applications into a Web services environment. Details of this strategy
will be
unveiled at SCO Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, August 17-19. (For more
details,
see: http://www.sco.com/2003forum ).

SCO remains committed to building new business opportunities for our
partners
such as you. We recognize that you have depended on us to provide
reliable,
solid technologies for your customers for over twenty years. We look
forward to
helping you and your customers meet your business needs for the next
twenty
years.

Sincerely,

Darl McBride
President and CEO
The SCO Group  


-- 
Ed Sawicki <ed at alcpress.com>
ALC