Open Source Victoria (OSV) has filed a complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) asking the industry watchdog to investigate the actions of The SCO Group.
The industry cluster--made up of 60 Victorian open source service providers and resellers--filed the complaint in light of SCO's 'unsubstantiated claims and extortive legal threats for money against possibly hundreds of thousands of Australians'.
SCO on Tuesday announced it had secured US copyright registrations for Unix System V code and intended to charge customers to run Linux. It also said companies, including resellers that are not compliant with its license requirements, could face litigation for copyright infringement.
OSV member Con Zymaris--who yesterday described the SCO debacle was like the IT industry version of a Nigerian extortion scam--said SCO have yet to prove their claim of the existence of any disputed source in the Linux code base. 'We believe that SCO will find it extremely difficult to cement their claims in court and until they do they are spreading fear to extract money from innocent users. We believe this is unethical and possibly illegal in Australia,' he said.
Zymaris questioned whether SCO could show that Unix System V source code did make it into the Linux kernel, 'SCO cannot absolve themselves from the fact that for the past few months, they have been publishing all such code publicly under the GNU public licence.'
He has called on Australian Linux users who feel pressured by SCO's actions to file complaints with the ACCC.
