The SCO Group has sold the first of its controversial Linux licences in the UK.

Richard Perkins, regional director for UK and Ireland at the company, told vnunet.com that two companies had signed up for licences in the past quarter, but would not give further details.

Perkins suggested that that other companies are likely to sign up if SCO gets some positive results in its ongoing legal battles. "I think it is [like] water behind a dam," he said.

SCO has claimed that Linux users need to buy the licences because its intellectual property has been added to the operating system without its consent.

Earlier this week at the SCO Forum in Las Vegas Chris Sontag, senior vice president and general manager of the SCOsource division, told vnunet.com that 20 to 30 organisations worldwide have now bought SCO Linux licences.

The company is also working on providing an SCO Linux licence bundled with its OpenServer and UnixWare operating systems.

The SCO Intellectual Property Licence was launched in the US in August last year and in the UK in January.

It permits the use of SCO's intellectual property, in binary form only, as allegedly contained in Linux distributions.

When it was launched in the UK, SCO said that by purchasing the licence, customers are "properly compensating SCO for the Unix source code, derivative Unix code and other Unix-related intellectual property and copyrights owned by SCO as it is currently found in Linux".

These claims are the subject of a lawsuit with IBM.