Court Adds Copyright to SCO's IBM Suit, Feb 28, 2004

A U.S. District Court has given SCO Group the OK to add copyright infringement claims to its Linux lawsuit against IBM.

"The Court, therefore, finding good cause shown hereby grants SCO Group's motion for leave to file amended pleadings," U.S. Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells wrote in the ruling. (Amended pleadings refer to the legal document in which SCO has added the copyright infringement claim.)

Allowing SCO to add the copyright infringement claims to the suit is expected to bump up potential damages by $2 billion for each claim, which would bring the potential damages to $5 billion.

A respected computer users group has begun lobbying Congress to ignore arguments against open-source software made by Unix vendor The SCO Group. In an interesting twist, both a Microsoft research engineer and a computer executive fired by his company for criticizing Microsoft have contributed to the effort.

On Friday, the Usenix Association, a 6,000-member nonprofit association of technical computer users based in Berkeley, Calif., published an open letter refuting many of the arguments that SCO had been making to Congress, including that Linux and open source software ran contrary to U.S. interests.

Usenix plans to send the letter to members of Congress and to a number of committees, caucuses and leadership organizations in Washington, D.C., according to association spokeswoman Wendy Grubow.

Webmaster's note: We originally posted the breaking news on this story directly from Italy's 'La Repubblica'

Rome City Council has added to the public sector organisations across Europe that have embraced open source software with a new Linux roll-out.

Linux software will initially be used for file-sharing and e-mail on a new Web portal due to go live in May but, if successful, could be expanded into other areas.

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