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The filing in question is SCO's Memorandum in Support of its Motion for Summary Judgment on IBM's Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Counterclaims (number 794), which is available on Pacer.

In it the Unix vendor denies having breached the GNU General Public License and having breached IBM's copyright in doing so. The company also claimed that where SCO has copied and distributed Linux in the past it has complied with the GPL, and that nothing in the GPL precludes SCO from issuing licenses to its Unix software.

This is important given one of the company's other claims that in August 2003 "SCO began offering its Intellectual Property License for Unix". It adds: "the Unix License is a license of SCO's Unix software, not a license or sublicense of Linux or of any IBM-copyrighted works."

Which would be fair enough, were it not for the fact that the license in question was not in fact the Intellectual Property License for Unix but the Intellectual Property License for Linux.

SCO's press release announcing its release can be found here while a description of it is here.

Notice that's the SCO Intellectual Property License for Linux, not Unix. A search for "Intellectual Property License for Unix" meanwhile reveals precisely nothing.

Either way the license was designed to cover Unix code SCO believed had been contributed to the Linux operating system.

So why the change of name? It may have been a mistake in the current filing, of course, but then SCO first began to reclassify its Intellectual Property for Linux as "a Unix License" in its November 2004 Memorandum in Opposition to IBM's Motion for Partial Summary Judgment on its Eighth Counterclaim.

SCO also claims in the same document that it "never repudiated the GPL".

However: "I predict that the GPL is not stable in its current form because copyright law pre-empts the GPL," SCO CEO, Darl McBride, told CBR in August 2003 (sadly no longer online unless anyone can find a copy, but very much on my desktop and in the archives, and a previous report on this can be found here).

"The General Public License… is unenforceable, void and/or voidable, and IBM's claims based thereon, or related thereto, are barred," SCO added in an October 2003 court filing before also claiming that it violated the US Constitution.

As the saying goes: "I am not a lawyer" and it may well be that SCO's argument holds some water, but the fact that it is prepared to misrepresent the name of its license and change its position on the GPL does not exactly instill a lot of confidence.

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