On November 18, 2003, Lindon, Utah-based SCO gave businesses running Linux 90 days to respond to its claims that they are responsible for copyright infringement arising from Unix code that SCO says has been copied into Linux.

As the owner of the original Unix System V code, SCO believes that it has copyright claims over that code, despite claims to the contrary from former Unix System V owner Novell Inc. Nevertheless it wants businesses running Linux to pay $699 per server to license its claimed intellectual property.

The issue right now is we were going to give people a period of time to license. We have had some people license. Then we said we’re going to move them into a litigation phase, so it is license or litigate, and what we are announcing today is that phase, said SCO chief executive officer Darl McBride last November.

That period of time is now up, and while there have been suggestions that SCO was targeting search company Google, there have been no formal moves by the Unix vendor.

Letters from SCO to Lehman Brothers have been included in a motion by Linux distributor Red Hat to supplement its legal case against SCO in which it is attempting to demonstrate that Red Hat’s technologies do not infringe any intellectual property of SCO.

Red Hat launched its legal battle against SCO in August 2003 seeking to clear its name amid SCO’s comments that Linux contained its intellectual property. SCO responded by attempting to dismiss the case arguing it had not given Red Hat reason to believe that it was about to take legal action against the Raleigh, North Carolina-based Linux vendor.

Red Hat’s motion to supplement its case seeks to support its claim, and includes copies of three letters sent from SCO to Red Hat customer Lehman Brothers in December 2003 and January 2004.

The first letter was sent to Lehman Brothers’ CEO Richard Fuld on December 19, and is broadly similar to the one SCO announced that it was sending to select Fortune 1,000 Linux end users in December providing notice that SCO believed them to be in infringement of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and outlining its claims over Linux code.

The second and third letters are identical and were both sent on January 16 to Fuld and Lehman Brothers’ chief of operations and technology, Jonathan Beyman.

In response, Lehman Brothers wrote to SCO on January 30 indicating it had directed the issues raised about Linux to Red Hat, and requested SCO to direct any further correspondence to the Linux vendor.

In its filing, Red Hat argued the letters provided evidence that SCO’s claims were interrupting its business.

Lehman Brothers is certainly not the only Linux user to have received such letters from SCO. Gavin Roy, chief information officer, with sport merchandising retailer Just Sports USA, is another to have received the second letter from SCO requesting a meeting to avoid legal action.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire