News

SCO adds licensing unit, famed attorney

• By Michael W. Bucken
• January 22, 2003

The SCO Group (http://www.sco.com) this week created a new business division dubbed SCOsource to manage the licensing of its Unix intellectual property assets and hired famed Microsoft prosecutor David Boies to defend those assets.

Officials from Lindon, Utah-based SCO Group, formerly Caldera International, said at this week's LinuxWorld conference that the new SCOsource division will be charged with expanding efforts to license the company's core intellectual property, including the core Unix source code inherited with its acquisition of the former Santa Cruz Operation.

The division's first offering will include SCO System V for Linux, which provides unbundled licensing of SCO's Unix System shared libraries for use with Unix applications, enabling them to run on Linux.

SCO Group President and CEO Darl McBride reminded observers that SCO is the developer and owner of SCO UnixWare and SCO OpenServer, both based on Unix System V technology. ''SCO owns much of the core Unix intellectual property, and has full rights to license this technology and enforce the associated patents and copyrights,'' he said.

McBride said the new division will expand SCO Group's licensing efforts, providing software and hardware suppliers with better access to licensing pacts for key pieces of Unix technology, including specific libraries to allow Unix applications to run on Linux-based systems.

Chris Sontag, senior vice president for operating systems and SCOsource, added that starting this week, his division will license SCO's libraries to third-party application developers, OS vendors, hardware providers, services vendors and end users.