A group of companies, led by IBM and Intel, plans to announce yesterday that it is setting up a US$10 million legal defense fund to help pay for the litigation costs of corporate users of the popular GNU Linux operating system if they are sued.
The defense fund is the latest move in a legal and marketing chess match that pits the companies and programmers supporting Linux against a small Utah company, the SCO Group. SCO owns the license rights to the Unix system and contends that Linux, a variant of Unix, violates its license and copyright. Its opponents deny this and say the company's rights are nowhere near as broad as SCO contends.
SCO began a campaign last year to collect fees from companies that support and use Linux. It first sued IBM, the world's largest computer company and a leading corporate champion of Linux, accusing it of illegally contributing Unix code to Linux and seeking US$1 billion in damages. IBM has denied the accusations.
SCO has hired one the nation's best-known litigators, David Boies, the lead trial lawyer for the Justice Department in the antitrust case against Microsoft. In November, Boies said that SCO planned to select and sue a large corporate user of Linux within three months.
Last month, SCO sent warning letters to several hundred corporate users of Linux, stating its contentions and threatening to sue.
"We believe these violations are serious, and we will take appropriate actions to protect our rights," the letters said.
The legal defense fund is an effort to allay the worries and reduce the risk to corporations, which increasingly use Linux as an operating system to run data-serving computers that power big networks and Web sites. Linux is distributed free, and is debugged and improved by a global community of programmers. Technology companies do charge for providing technical support for Linux, and manufacturers sell a lot of server computers that run the Linux system. In corporate data centers, Linux has emerged as a strong alternative to Unix and Microsoft Windows.
The fund is to be administered by the Open Source Development Laboratories, a consortium seeking to hasten the adoption of Linux. The group's 30 members, besides IBM and Intel, include companies like Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Novell.
The lab employs, among others, Linus Torvalds, the Finnish programmer who wrote the initial kernel of Linux and oversees the development of the operating system.
The US$10 million figure is a target for the fund, but one that should be easily reached, said Stuart Cohen, chief executive of the consortium.
"Several million dollars" have already been collected in recent days, Cohen said, from IBM, Intel and MontaVista Software, which makes Linux-based software used in communications and consumer electronics devices. Several other members of the open source group have expressed a willingness to contribute, he said.
The funds, Cohen added, could also be used to defend Torvalds in case he is sued personally. SCO has not threatened to sue him.
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