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Follow UsSEATTLE: Software company Novell Inc. and the SCO Group Inc., which are feuding over the rights to the UNIX software code, made conflicting claims to an amendment to a 1995 contract between the parties.
In another move to strengthen its claims, SCO has shown some 80 lines of code, which, it claims, are a direct lift from its own code, reports slashdot and Internetweek.
One of the first observers to see the evidence in the SCO Group Inc.'s intellectual-property claim against IBM and the Linux community says there are direct similarities between the Unix code that SCO claims control over and the Linux operating system.
Last month, SCO alleged that Novell and other companies, including IBM, have abused its intellectual property rights by taking code from its Unix operating system software and including it in Linux, a derivative version of Unix that can be copied and modified freely. The two companies are arguing over whether their contract transferred complete ownership rights of Unix from Novell to SCO.
Novell said on Friday that it had received an amendment to the 1995 agreement with SCO for the first time on Thursday, which 'appears to support SCO's claim that ownership of certain copyrights for Unix did transfer to SCO in 1996.'
Novell argues that SCO never owned the copyrights and patents to the Unix software, since those rights were explicitly excluded from the original agreement.
SCO said, however, that it had issued an amendment in October of 1996 that clarified ownership of Unix copyrights.
Legal experts said that the public spat indicated that the case was likely to end up in court. So far, SCO has only issued warnings against Novell, IBM and 1,500 of the world's largest corporations informing them that their use of Linux may be in violation of SCO's software rights.
Linux is the major rival to Unix and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software.
Unix was developed in the 1960s by AT&T Corp. although the majority of big computer companies -- including Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM and Hewlett-Packard Co. -- licensed the technology and developed their own version of the software.
The product was sold to Novell in 1992, which in turn sold the technology to SCO in 1995. SCO made the first version of Unix to work on computers that use Intel Corp. chips. It also helped IBM develop its own version of Unix, called AIX.
But with the growth of Microsoft's Windows software and the advent of Linux as a popular alternative to Unix, SCO struggled. It eventually sold the technology to Caldera, a distributor of Linux, which now calls itself The SCO Group.
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