Hewlett Packard is to indemnify customers against the potential results of SCO's legal actions.

The ongoing controversy over SCO's claim that its code has been used in Linux, and its $3bn lawsuit directed against IBM, has caught the attention of users who have lobbied IBM for clarification of their position.

SCO said earlier this month that it would bill 1,000 corporates using Linux over the next two months, paving the way for potential lawsuits against Linux users.

HP is the first major vendor to assume liability for its customers' use of Linux.

"HP will bear the potential legal responsibility for these customers that implement Linux on HP's platforms," said Martin Fink, vice president of Linux, HP Enterprise Servers and Storage at HP.

"We have decided that it is in our customers' best interest to offer indemnification to any company who acquires Linux directly from HP with a standard support contract - after 1 October 2003.

"We have not and will not sign an agreement with SCO and have not exchanged monies for this indemnification."

Fink added that, although HP would not comment on the possible outcome of SCO's lawsuit, it did not see any infringements.

"To date, HP has not found any copyright violations or patent infringements within Linux," he said in a statement.

"In general, we have not found that customers are particularly worried about the long-term viability of Linux.

"Even still, HP developed this indemnification offer to further encourage customers to choose Linux."

Last week, Sun Microsystems announced that it would indemnify customers using its forthcoming open source Mad Hatter desktop software, but not the underpinning Linux technology which is being supplied by Red Hat.

Novell, which acquired open source software vendor Ximian recently, has confirmed that it will not indemnify users, saying that offering such insurance is a matter for Linux distributors SuSE, Red Hat and Mandrake.

The distributors are yet to clarify whether they will take measures to protect customers.

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