Litigious Unix vendor SCO Group , which became one of the most hated names in tech after it sued various Linux customers, announced this week that it's seen a sharp decline in income, caused in part by shrinking demand for its products and millions of dollars in legal bills.
It was at the November 1995 Unix Expo in New York, following Novell's announcement that it was selling its Unix interests to SCO.
"We have very strict confidentiality agreements with IBM about what they can and can't do" with Unix developed using SCO intellectual property, said Darl McBride , president and chief executive of SCO.
In addition, SCO developed a means by which Unix could be run on mass-market computer chips manufactured by Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people ).
The suit charges that IBM "misappropriated the confidential and proprietary information" from a joint SCO-IBM project, called project Monterey, to run Unix on an advanced 64-bit computing system on the Intel platform.
The project was terminated in May 2001, SCO says, alleging that IBM "misused its access to the Unix Software Code" to help build the Linux open standard.
"IBM made concentrated efforts to improperly destroy the economic value of Unix, particularly Unix on Intel, to benefit IBM's new Linux services business, " SCO said today in a prepared statement.
He also said that a specific type of intellectual property cited in the suit, the so-called "shared libraries" used in the operation of Unix, was "one of seven or eight" different types of IP which SCO is investigating for IP violations by Linux developers.
In late January 2002, SCO announced that it was creating a division to expand licensing its intellectual property, including the core Unix source code.
As evidence, SCO cites numerous statements from IBM and its executives that it would use knowledge from both Monterey and earlier IBM Unix iterations to improve Linux.
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