"As part of a series of licensing agreements, Sun acquired rights to make and ship derivative products based on the intellectual property in Unix. This forms the foundation for the Solaris operating system that ships today.

"Sun's complete line of Solaris and Linux products -- including Solaris for the SPARC and x86 platforms, Trusted Solaris, the highly secure operating system, and Sun Linux - are all covered by Sun's portfolio of Unix licensing agreements. As such, Solaris and Sun Linux represent safe choices for those companies that develop and deploy services based on Unix systems," he said.-- John Loiacono, 2003-03-06

"SCO is in the enviable position of owning the UNIX operating system," said Darl McBride, president and CEO, SCO, in an interview with eWeek Thursday. "It is clear from our stand point that we have an extremely compelling case against IBM. SCO has more than 30,000 contracts with UNIX licensees and upholding these contracts is as important today as the day they were signed."

[...] "IBM has been happily giving part of the AIX code away to the Linux community, but the problem is that they don't own the AIX code," he said. "And so it's a huge problem for us. We have been talking to IBM in this regard since early December and have reached an impasse. This was thus the only way forward for us."

The Unix contracts held by SCO were "extremely powerful and one of the remedies under the contract is that we have the ability to revoke their AIX license," he said. "We have to give them 100 days notice before we do that. If they don't cure the problems we have then we will revoke their license. We sent them a letter today informing them of that, so the 100-day clock has started."-- Darl McBride, 2003-03-06

"We did a channel survey recently to see where our solution partners were, what platforms they were running on, and what applications they were running. I don't remember any questions like these even being part of that survey. This latest survey wasn't commissioned by us, I can tell you that," he said.-- Darl McBride, 2003-03-06

The president of an exclusively Linux/Open Source shop told eWeek last week that he had recently participated in a 20 minute phone survey that began with a statement to the effect that a company named SCO was pursuing legal remedy to protect its intellectual property.

The researcher had begun with a statement to the effect that a company named SCO was pursuing legal remedy to protect its intellectual property. "I had my suspicions, but as soon as they asked my familiarity with, respect for and opinion of, Red Hat and IBM, I knew what was going on. They also asked me about Sony and Ford - I believe several automotive components run on Linux," he said.

The next set of questions, the researcher said, had to do with his understanding of intellectual property laws. They were followed by questions regarding several aspects of intellectual property rights - from music to software and copyrighted printed materials. The questions then moved on to how his opinion of a company would be affected if certain statements were used.

"And all of them had to do with the way to spin public perception of a company that is suing a lot of other popular companies for using a product that helps them make money, but for which they refuse to pay the company that produced the original product," he said.

"They spun it about 15 different ways, using different verbiage and angles," he said. "They even went as far as asking me if I'd think more highly of the litigious company if they donated a portion of the funds generated from lawsuits to some charity."-- Undisclosed SOURCE, 2003-03-06