Action imminent in SCO case

SCO Group's next move in its legal wrestling match with IBM is likely to come on Monday, possibly in the form of a request that a judge halt Big Blue's Unix product sales.

Friday is the deadline for IBM to meet SCO's demand that it comply with the terms of its licence to sell Unix or face revocation of that licence. But IBM, which says it hasn't done anything wrong, isn't likely to yield to SCO's demands. "We think we have nothing to do. We haven't violated the contract," said IBM spokeswoman Trink Guarino.

SCO's course of action is clear. "If SCO truly believes what they're saying, once the cure period comes and goes without any action by IBM, they should quite promptly be filing in court a request for preliminary injunction," said Rich Gray, a Silicon Valley intellectual-property attorney. The preliminary injunction would likely seek to block IBM's future sales of its Unix product, AIX.

SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said the company probably will announce its next move Monday. A request for preliminary injunction is "a likely option, but it's one of many we could take," he said.

SCO will probably take the weekend to decide what to do. Barring any settlement by the end of Friday, 13 June, "you should expect on (June) 16th, we will be taking appropriate steps to enforce the contract rights we have," SCO chief executive Darl McBride said last week.

In March, SCO surprised the computing industry by suing IBM for more than $1bn, arguing that the company broke its contract with SCO by misappropriating trade secrets that SCO owned by using them to improve Linux. Simultaneously, SCO told IBM that if it didn't come into compliance with the contract within 100 days, it would revoke IBM's contract to sell AIX servers.

The case directly affects a major portion of IBM's business. In 2002, it had $3.6bn in Unix server sales, according to Gartner. That figure doesn't include revenue from support or software such as Big Blue's Tivoli, DB2 or WebSphere products that often are sold along with those servers.

The two companies have discussed settlement, but those talks haven't been fruitful, Stowell said. "We've had discussions with them prior to today, but those discussions were short," he said.