Happy Christmas SCO style

The SCO Group has chosen the season of goodwill to send letters to selected Fortune 1000 Linux users, identifying further alleged violations of its Linux copyrights.

In an escalation of the case against Linux which began last March, the company said: "SCO has commenced providing notification to selected Fortune 1000 Linux end users outlining additional violations of SCO's copyrights contained in Linux."

The names of the companies which will receive the letters, sent on Friday, were not disclosed, but they number several hundred.

SCO said in its statement: "Certain copyrighted application binary interfaces have been copied verbatim from the Unix System V code base and contributed to Linux without proper authorisation and without copyright attribution."

In addition, SCO states in the letter that there are in excess of 65 program files likewise "copied verbatim from [SCO's] copyrighted Unix code base and contributed to Linux".

SCO's latest move is unexpected, since it last month announced plans to sue just one large corporate Linux user in the next three months.

SCO also said that it will soon send letters to many of its own Unix licensees asking them to confirm in writing that they are complying with the SCO licences, and that none of their employees or contractors have contributed Unix code to Linux.

The company has today released full-year financial results, with fourth-quarter revenues of £24.3m, made up of $14m for Unix products and services, plus $10.3m derived from licensing agreements with Microsoft and Sun Microsystems made earlier in the year.