"One the one hand, you want to laugh and say this is an interesting sideshow," Haff said. "But if directives were to start coming down from CEOs of, 'Get that Linux stuff out of my shop,' it's going to be very disruptive for a lot of IT shops, very disruptive for a lot of vendors and very expensive."-- Gordon Haff, 2003-05-15

"SCO has lobbed its dirty bomb into the user community, saying, 'You'd better clean this up in a big hurry or there's going to be a lot of damage,'" said Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff. "I guess suing IBM wasn't enough to get them acquired, so this is the next stage."-- Gordon Haff, 2003-05-15

"The only rational explanation for this is it's a plea for money, essentially, from IBM and others that can't afford to let Linux be derailed," he said. "SCO is not the least afraid of being the bad guys here."-- Gordon Haff, 2003-05-15

"It's [copying] way wider than we expected. We thought our main focus would be with IBM. It still is our predominant effort,"-- Chris Sontag, 2003-05-15

"Legal liability may rest with the end users. It is not carried by the distributor or by anyone else involved in selling that Linux distribution into these commercial accounts. It resides with the end users, which is unheard of. They need to know they have exposure in this issue," Sontag said.-- Chris Sontag, 2003-05-15

"We certainly have suspended our activities with UnitedLinux," SCO's Sontag said. SuSE's argument that its UnitedLinux contract protects it from SCO legal action is baseless, he added.

"That simply is not the case at all," Sontag said. "Public statements to that effect (are) the farthest thing from the truth."-- Chris Sontag, 2003-05-15

"We think it is appropriate that we warn commercial companies that there are intellectual property issues with Linux," Chris Sontag, head of the effort to derive more revenue from SCO's intellectual property, said in an interview. "We sent it to the Fortune 500 and effectively the global 2000. It ended up being about 1,500 top international companies."-- Chris Sontag, 2003-05-15

"We've identified a large number of contributions from various sources which are very disconcerting to us, and additional areas of code with no attribution to any contributor or maintainer at all," Sontag said. "This is in the kernel, and also in extended areas of Linux."

Sontag said IBM employees were among those who copied code. In reading Big Blue's Web site describing Linux contributions, one can "find a lot of areas they mention code contributions they have made from AIX into Linux," Sontag said. AIX is IBM's version of Unix.-- Chris Sontag, 2003-05-15

"They're not well loved," Weiss said. "I guess SCO is really attempting to create a fairly large disruption of Linux, and will attempt to take the Linux community with them in the defense of their intellectual property, regardless of how poorly it goes off in the Linux community."-- George Weiss, 2003-05-15