Xinuos filed a lawsuit in the US Virgin Islands alleging the theft of intellectual property and collusion of the monopoly market against joint defendants IBM and Red Hat. Xinuos was formed through the assets of SCO Group about ten years ago under the name UnXis and at the time, SCO's successor had no interest in continuing the latter's long dispute over Linux. The copyright claims are now almost over 17 years old and have been repeatedly frowned upon.
Xinuos is the company that bought the remains of the SCO Group in 2011. The SCO Group, meanwhile, is a company famous not for its products, but for its litigation against IBM and Linux. In 2001, SCO, a Unix company, joined forces with Caldera, a Linux company, to form what should have been a great rival to Red Hat. Instead, two years later, SCO sued IBM in an all-out legal attack on Linux.
In 2003, SCO Group filed a similar intellectual property complaint with Xinuos. It argued that SCO Group owned the rights to the source code for AT & T's Unix and UnixWare operating systems, that Linux 2.4.x and 2.5.x were unauthorized derivatives of Unix, and that IBM had violated its contractual obligations by distributing Linux code.
New Lawsuit Alleges IBM Incorporated Unspecified Code from UnixWare and OpenServe Coder of the company on IBM's own AIX operating system. It also alleges that IBM and Red Hat directly conspired to split the entire systems market. Unix-like operating systems in great business opportunities for IBM, leaving Xinuos behind:
“First, IBM stole the intellectual property of Xinuos and used that stolen property to build and sell a competing product of Xinuos. Second, with the stolen property in the hands of IBM, IBM and Red Hat illegally agreed to divide the affected market and use their growing market power to victimize consumers, innovative competitors, and innovation itself. Third, after IBM and Red Hat launched their conspiracy, IBM acquired Red Hat to solidify and make their plan permanent. "
Xinuos expands on the damage it believes it suffered in the full lawsuit:
“Due to these activities, Xinuos has been excluded from key market opportunities. For example, despite the fact that Xinuos offers a FreeBSD-based operating system with substantial commercial value to commercial users, Xinuos has not been able to garner as much financial support or customer interest for it. OpenServer 10 that I could and should have done due to market conditions. In fact, the market is so distorted that Xinuos has determined that more than 70% fewer of its customers can license their new operating system than would be available in a functioning market. The foreclosure effect on Xinuos is felt by all competitors equally. "
Xinuos demand also claims that IBM has misled investors by stating in your annual reports since 2008 that you own all copyrights in Unix and UnixWare.
“While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property,” Sean Snyder said in a statement, “it is also market manipulation that has hurt consumers, competition, the open community, source and innovation itself ”.
Even more surprising, the company claims that IBM expressly seeks to destroy FreeBSD in its entirety: "IBM's strategy with Red Hat has been expressly to destroy FreeBSD, on which the most recent innovations from Xinuos were based."
And it continues to seek not just damages, but the complete reversal of IBM's acquisition of Red Hat: "The merger must be declared illegal in violation of at least Section 7 of the Clayton Act, and IBM and Red Hat must be ordered to separate and cancel all associated agreements between them."
While Red Hat did not immediately respond to the complaint, IBM spokesman Doug Shelton said:
"Xinuos's copyright claims only repeat the worn-out claims of its predecessor, whose copyrights were bought by Xinuos after bankruptcy, and they have no basis." He adds that “Xinuos's antitrust charges against IBM and Red Hat, the world's largest free software company, also defy logic. IBM and Red Hat will vigorously defend the integrity of the open source software development process and the inherent choice and therefore the competition that open source software promotes.