Buyer of SCO’s OpenServer sues IBM and Red Hat

Xinuos is suing IBM and Red Hat for illegally copying its source code for server operating systems. Xinuos is the company that bought SCO’s Unix patents. SCO spent years trying to claim ownership of Unix.

Xinuos states in a press release that IBM and Red Hat are infringing its copyright and violating competition rules. IBM and Red Hat have agreed to divide the relevant market and use their growing market power to victimize consumers, competitors and innovation. After that “conspiracy,” as Xinuos calls it, IBM is said to have acquired Red Hat. That happened in 2018. Furthermore, the claim is that IBM has been misleading investors since 2008, by claiming that a third party that owns the copyright to Unix and Unixware would not file any copyright claims against the company.

Xinuos chief executive Sean Snyder believes the company’s OS, FreeBSD-based OpenServer 10, has been pushed off the market by alleged IBM and Red Hat practices. The same would happen with other competing Unix and Linux-based server operating systems. Xinuos relies on competition and copyright laws of the US and the Virgin Islands, where the company is incorporated.

The case can be traced back to SCO’s past lawsuits over the copyright of Unix and Linux, ZDNet describes. SCO was a Unix company that, along with Linux company Caldera, sought to compete with Red Hat in 2001 and sued IBM in 2003, claiming that the company was using Unix source code in its Linux operating system. It was striking that Microsoft took a license on software from SCO and invested millions. SCO called itself “the owner of the Unix operating system” and even threatened to sue Linus Torvalds.

However, in 2007, the court ruled that Novell, not SCO, owned the relevant copyright in Unix. In 2011, SCO sold its operating systems OpenServer and UnixWare to UnXis, which later changed its name to Xinuos. SCO itself closed its doors in 2012. Initially, UnXis said it would not follow in SCO’s footsteps with copyright lawsuits, but the company now seems to be backing off. Xinuos is demanding an undisclosed amount from IBM and wants the infringement to end.