"What they have to prove is there was some code from AIX ... that actually made its way into Linux," Claybrook said. "That may not be hard to prove."-- Bill Claybrook, 2003-03-07

"The complaint is full of bare allegations and no facts to support it," he said. "SCO never approached IBM ... in advance of filing it" to discuss the matter.-- Mike Fay, 2003-03-07

Brian Ferguson, an intellectual property attorney at McDermott Will & Emery LLP in Chicago, said the SCO suit against IBM is "an attempt to show the industry that they mean business."

"It looks to me like a strategy not necessarily to save their own business, but to use the intellectual property purely as a manner of generating revenue," Ferguson said. "It's one thing to have an executive of IBM make a comment. It's another thing to take that comment and make it into a claim."

[...] "I'm sure SCO is going to paint this as the tiny little David vs. the Goliath who stole their secrets out from under them," Ferguson said. "That's the risk that IBM takes, and that could make them negotiate [a settlement], even if they think they have the better case."-- Brian Ferguson, 2003-03-07

"It's possible, if you're not filtering carefully, yes, there could be something in that that infringes on someone else's intellectual property rights," Kelly said.-- Brian Kelly, 2003-03-07

Darl McBride, SCO's CEO since June, said in an interview this morning that the lawsuit was inspired by public comments made recently by IBM executives who have allegedly said they're moving features from IBM's AIX Unix into Linux to benefit enterprise customers as part of IBM's Linux strategy. The problem with that, McBride said, is IBM doesn't own AIX, but licenses it through SCO.

"It goes to the heart of confidentiality agreements in AIX contracts," he said. "IBM has been publicly saying that they're OK putting AIX into open source, that it's not a problem for them," he said. "When you take our valuable intellectual property and say you're going to move it into open source, then we have a major problem."

[...] "This case is about IBM making commitments to us and honoring them."-- Darl McBride, 2003-03-07