SCO's claims unfounded, says US retail body

A LEADING retail group has claimed that SCO's anti-Linux law suit is groundless because it had no legal ownership of Unix in the first place.

In a press release, the US National Retail Federation chief information officer, Dave Hogan, said that based on the information the organisation had seen, it believed that the SCO claims that it owned the rights to part of the Linux code were without merit.

SCO claimed that it got the rights for Unix System V from Novell and that Linux contained elements of that code within it.

However USNF, which is the largest retail organisation in the US, said that Novell was the last company that could demonstrate legal ownership of Unix System V.

Hogan pointed out that Novell had since filed a court challenge to SCO's claim of intellectual property rights, demonstrating serious questions regarding whether SCO ever gained legal ownership to Unix System V from them.

"The SCO Group's business model is to generate a revenue stream through litigation. NRF expects that retailers who use Linux will survive the current litigation," the press release said.