Darl McBride, The SCO Group Inc.s CEO said on Monday that the company will name its next target for legal action on Tuesday. SCO will bring suit against a major, non-technology company for its use of Linux.
Speculation has continued to circulate that the software firm was set to file suit against a Linux user as early as last week. In a November eWeek.com interview, McBride said that SCO expected to file at least one lawsuit against a large Linux user within 90 days as part of its effort to expand the scope of its legal battle with the open-source operating system.
As pointed out in a recent eWEEK analysis, that deadline came and went last week.
In an exclusive interview on Monday afternoon with eWEEK.com, McBride said the choice of target was still up in the air. “Our lawyers are deciding between two companies. We will announce which one it will be late tomorrow morning or early tomorrow afternoon.”
However, Blake Stoweell, SCOs communications director, on Tuesday afternoon said in an eWEEK.com interview that while “the law suit would be filed today [Tuesday], SCO would not be annnouncing the name of the company until tomorrow morning, March 3.”
McBride indicated that lead SCO attorney David Boies [who represented the Department of Justice in its antitrust case against Microsoft] of the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP would make the final call.
McBride continued, “Neither company is in the technology business.” This appears to rule out Google, which had frequently been mentioned as a possible SCO target. However, he said that “both are major firms that are names anyone would recognize.”
“They are also,” he added, “businesses that were on our list of approximately 1,500 companies that we sent warnings to about their use of Linux in 2003. Weve been in talks for several months with and both of them said no deal.”
Although SCO will only bring action against one company tomorrow, the other company on the short list will be sued in time, McBride said.
“There will be more lawsuits to come. But, we dont see this as an RIAA situation with hundreds of law suits filed in a day. Boise will also decide the scheduling of these cases.”
Meanwhile, was an eventful day for the Lindon, Utah-based technology firm. Earlier that day, SCO finally announced the name of a company that had signed its intellectual-property-licensing agreement granting it the right to use Linux. The company was EV1Servers.Net, the dedicated-hosting division of Houston-based Everyones Internet.
In addition, the Bremen, Germany-based Linux reseller and integrator Univention GmbH, announced that SCOs German division had agreed to an out-of-court settlement to stop claims that Linux contains unauthorized SCO-owned Unix intellectual property and to halt threats of legal actions against German Linux users.
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