| Sumario: | During 2003, Darl McBride, the chief executive of SCO, has been involved in a number of battles to preserve his firm's ownership of the UNIX computer operating system, from which the Linux system is derived. He claims to have found violations of his company's intellectual property in Linux code. In March, he sued IBM, a backer of Linux, for damages; in June, he threatened 1,500 companies using linux; and in July, he sought licence fees for Linux. Open-sourcers are frustrated at SCO's refusal the lines of code it finds problematic, but McBride argues that if it did, that would be in effect open-sourcing. This uncertainty benefits Microsoft whose Windows operating system is Linux's rival and although Microsoft and SCO deny they are in league most open-sourcers suspect they are.
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