Red Hat wants blood in SCO battle

According to Cnet, the company wants to carry on with its law suit against SCO and get a declaration from the beak that it isn't violating SCOs copyrights or trade secrets.

SCO is on the ropes at the moment after losing a large chunk of its legal fighting funds when its VC Baystar backed out of the company.

Red Hat had wanted to get the ruling so that SCO would stop suing it and other Linux users for allegedly stealing its code.

However Sue Robinson, chief judge for the US District Court in Delaware, said that the case should be put on hold until a separate lawsuit filed by SCO against IBM had been resolved.

SCO sued Big Blue last March claiming that IBMs move to Linux had broken a contract between the pair. In February this year SCO added an allegation that IBM had infringed its copyright by using Linux, which it believes features code it owns.

However Red Hat's lawyers argued that the SCO and IBM case is all about a contractual relationship between IBM and SCO. Red Hat's action, it says, concerns the damage SCO has done and is continuing to do to Red Hat.

Its lawyers claim that Red Hat is suffering injustice as a result of the hold, because it leaves SCO open to pursue its campaign against Linux and force Red Hat customers "to sign licences to use open-source code that SCO did not even develop." µ