SCO Group
shares plummeted by nearly 40 per cent to $1.20 on Friday after a judge upheld
an earlier
ruling throwing out most of the company's legal case against
IBM.
SCO claims to own key elements of the intellectual property used in the Unix
operating system, and alleges that its code has ended up illegally in Linux
distributions.
Advertisement
The company filed a lawsuit against IBM in 2003 in which it alleged that Big
Blue illegally contributed SCO source code to Linux.
Friday's stock market beating came after a judge upheld a ruling made in June
in which a Utah judge dismissed the vast majority of SCO's legal claims against
IBM.
The judge stated that the software firm had failed to produce any evidence to
back up its intellectual property ownership claims.
SCO countered that IBM already knew what code it had "stolen" and was
therefore in a much better position to disclose the details.
Following the legal set-back, SCO's market capitalisation now stands at $26m.
Shortly after launching its legal offensive, the company's stock peaked at
nearly $20, representing a market capitalisation of roughly $400m.
The case has served as a cautionary tale of the intellectual property
challenges faced by open source software.
Software vendors including IBM,
Computer
Associates and even
Microsoft
have made patent pledges in which they promise not to assert their intellectual
property against open source developers and users under certain conditions.
Do you agree?
Have your say on this article