SCO Denies Rumors that Google is its Next Legal Target

The SCO Group Inc. earlier this month announced that it would file at least one lawsuit against a large corporate Linux user within the next 90 days as part of its effort to expand its legal war with Linux and its business supporters. This week, according to a LinuxWorld report, Lindon, Utah-based SCO picked its target: Google, the worlds largest search engine company.

The report, based on a single anonymous source, sparked considerable discussion among Linux and open-source supporters.

However, SCO spokesman Blake Stowell on Wednesday denied that Google has been singled out for SCOs legal action.

"We have not yet decided what company we will sue for Unix intellectual property rights. At this time, we dont even have a date for when we will decide except that it will be by the end of our already started 90-day clock," Stowell said.

At the same time, Stowell admitted that of Mountain View, Calif.-based Google was one of the Fortune 1000 companies notified by SCO that its use of Linux violated SCOs intellectual property rights, even though the search engine company isnt publicly traded.

Google, like many other search engine companies such as AltaVista Co. and Excite Networks Inc., use Linux to drive their online services.

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