SCO fined for Linux claims

The SCO Group Inc. has been fined $10,800 for violating a German court's ruling that SCO must cease claiming that the Linux source code violates its intellectual property, the Lindon, Utah, company confirmed on Monday.

The fine comes nearly three months after a regional court in Munich issued the court order in response to a suit brought by the non-profit Linux conference organization, LinuxTag e.V., and IT consulting firm Tarent GmbH.

The two groups sought the injunction to prevent SCO from making claims about intellectual property violations in Linux without presenting any evidence, according to LinuxTag spokesman Andreas Gebhard.

In March, SCO launched a $3 billion lawsuit against IBM Corp., claiming the computer maker had inappropriately contributed code to the Linux operating system. SCO has also claimed that Linux contains code that was copied line for line from its Unix System V source code, as well as "obfuscated" code that is almost identical to that in System V.

SCO has been criticized for not revealing evidence of Linux source code violations. When the company did reveal two snippets of allegedly illegal code at its SCO Forum user conference two weeks ago, they were quickly dissected by the Linux community, which claimed that both snippets were legal.

Since the Munich court ruling, SCO has been enjoined in Germany from saying that the Linux source code contains intellectual property violations, Gebhard said. "They are not allowed to say this in Germany because this is not true. They cannot justify this," he said.

In early June, SCO shut down its German Web site in an effort to remove all offending material. [See, "SCO hit by legal action in Germany," June 4.]

However, the company had neglected to remove a document entitled, "Letter to SCO's Partners" from its Sco.de Web site, according to SCO spokesman Blake Stowell. It was this page that led to the fine, he added. SCO has since removed the offending page, but a similar page can be found on SCO's U.S. Web site at http://www.sco.com/scosource/letter_to_partners.html.

SCO is appealing the fine, Stowell said.