Recently the news broke that Xinuos people have taken legal action against IBM and Red Hat and it is that Xinuos claims IBM illegally copied Xinuos code for its server operating systems and conspired with Red Hat to illegally divide the market.
According to Xinuos, the IBM-Red Hat collusion has hurt the open source community, consumers and competition, and has hampered innovation. Including the actions of IBM and Red Hat to share the market, grant mutual preferences, and promote each other's products negatively affected the distribution of the Xinuos product to OpenServer 10, which competes with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Xinuos company (UnXis) in 2011 bought the bankrupt SCO Group business continued to develop and OpenServer operating system. OpenServer is the successor to SCO UNIX and UnixWare, but since the release of OpenServer 10, the operating system has been based on FreeBSD.
The process developed in two directions: violation of antitrust legislation and violation of intellectual property. Part 1 looks at how, having dominated the Unix / Linux server operating system market, IBM and Red Hat have supplanted competing systems such as FreeBSD-based OpenServer.
“IBM has made demonstrably and materially misleading statements in securities presentations about its participation in the Code. In every annual report filed with the SEC since 2008, IBM has stated that a third party owns all copyrights to UNIX and UnixWare, and that this third party has waived any claim of infringement against IBM.
Xinuos claims that IBM's manipulation of the market and Red Hat collusion started long before IBM bought Red Hat, Back in the days when UnixWare 7 and OpenServer 5 had significant market share. IBM's takeover of Red Hat is interpreted as an attempt to strengthen collusion and move the implemented scheme to the permanent category.
The second part, related to intellectual property, it is a continuation of an old lawsuit between SCO and IBM, which at one point exhausted SCO's resources and led to the company's bankruptcy. Lawsuit states IBM illegally used intellectual property by Xinuos to create and sell a product that competed with UnixWare and OpenServer, and defrauded investors about their rights to use the Xinuos code.
Among other things, it is alleged that in the 2008 report submitted to the securities commission, there was deliberately false information that the proprietary rights of UNIX and UnixWare belong to a third party, who has waived any claim against IBM related to the infringement. of your right.
According to IBM representatives, the charges are unfounded and only rephrasing the old arguments of the SCO, whose intellectual property ended up in the hands of Xinuos after the bankruptcy. The accusations of violating antitrust laws go against the logic of open source development.
IBM and Red Hat will do their best to protect the integrity of open source collaborative development processes, choice and competition that encourages open source development.
Recall that in 2003 SCO accused IBM of transferring the Unix code to the Linux kernel developers, after which it was discovered that all rights to the Unix code did not belong to SCO, but to Novell.
Then, Novell sued SCO for using someone else's intellectual property to prosecute other companies. Therefore, to continue its attacks on IBM and Linux users, SCO was faced with the need to demonstrate its rights to Unix.
SCO disagreed with Novell's position, but after years of repeated litigation, the court ruled that in the sale of its Unix-related business to SCO, Novell did not transfer ownership of its intellectual property to SCO, and all Charges brought by SCO's attorneys to other companies are unfounded.
Source: https://www.xinuos.com