The SCO Group, owners of the Unix operating system and every operating system that vaguely resembles Unix, announced today that it has filed suit against S. Claus Industries headquartered at the North Pole for violation of its intellectual property.

"Mr. Claus was an early licensee of Unix and ran his entire operation on Unix systems," SCO representative Blake Stowell said. "About 10 years ago, he stopped sending royalty checks, and we discovered that he had illegally migrated to Linux".

SCO concluded that he had stolen numerous features of Unix and incorporated them into his business. Mr. Stowell noted that "Santa's elves" are merely an obfuscated copy of the Unix concept of "daemons". In addition, he asserted that previously Mr. Claus had only used a single big reindeer, but was now using eight tiny reindeer instead, an idea that he clearly stole from the SysV implementation of SMP.

Mr. Claus denied the allegation. "The truth is that I was having a couple of beers with my buddy, Donald Becker, and when he learned that there were hundreds of tiny reindeer available, he suggested I build a Beowulf cluster out of them".

Claus also admitted that he had migrated his back office operations from SCO Openserver to Linux. "You just can't keep track of whether 6 billion people have been naughty or nice on an antiquated 32 bit operating system" he said.

Mr. Stowell countered, "We don't have any business process patents, or any other kind of patents either for that matter, but if we did, Claus would clearly be in violation of them".

In addition to stealing features of Unix to run his business, SCO also alleges that Claus violated his Unix contract by leaking methods and concepts of Unix to Professor Andrew Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds who subsequently used them in their own operating systems. "All we are saying is look at the map." Stowell said. "All of these individuals were located really far north, and it doesn't take an MIT rocket scientist to figure out what must have happened."

"This will really rock the Christmas gift industry," analyst Laura DiDio said. "Given the cloud hanging over Claus, I'm recommending that people give Microsoft products, and only Microsoft products, as gifts this year".

Analyst Rob Enderle stated that he wasn't surprised. "The fact is that I could always count on Bill Gates to throw buckets of money at me, and Claus never gave me anything."

SCO President Darl McBride defended the lawsuit while acknowledging that it would be unpopular. "Look, we aren't all sitting around the fireplace singing Christmas carols. This is a business," he said. "We don't want Claus to change his business. We just think we should get a cut of every package he delivers."