Novell accuses SCO of extorting money from Linux community

THE SCO GROUP was issued with a dual challenge by Novell today over who owns Unix and its intellectual property rights claims, confirming an earlier Wall St Journal story. Novell has upped the ante against SCO, accusing it of attempting to "extort" money out of the Linux community.

In a statement Novell said that it didn't believe SCO's claim that it owned the copyright on Unix System V, and said the purchase agreement between it and SCO in 1995 did not transfer such rights to the firm. Novell said, it had asked SCO to back up its assertion that some Unix System V was copied into Linux.

It wrote a letter to SCO asking it to clarify those claims. CEO Jack Messman wrote that to his company's knowledge, SCO buying Unix from Novelll did not transfer the associated copyrights. He said: "We believe it unlikely that SCO can demonstrate that it has any ownership interest whatsoever in those copyrights. Apparently tou share this view, since... you have repeatedly asked Novell to transfer the copyrights to SCO, requests that Novell has rejected".

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