"The GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, together with copyright, antitrust and export control laws," SCO Group said in an answer filed late Friday to an IBM court filing. In addition, SCO asserted that the GPL is unenforceable.

The assertions direct even more attention to the license, which already was at the center of many of IBM's arguments against SCO in August.

Context

What's new?

The SCO Group's lawsuit against IBM now also targets the General Public License, the legal foundation for Linux, numerous other open-source programming projects and software SCO still ships.

Bottom line:

The GPL covers countless open-source programs, several of which are central to product plans from computing industry giants. If its legal validity is undermined in court, it could have serious repercussions for many products--including some of SCO's.

"The GPL has never been tested before. This is raising the stakes on that," said David Byre, an intellectual-property attorney and partner at law firm Test Hurwitz & Thebe Ault law firm. If a ruling comes out declaring the GPL void, "a lot of people are going to be potentially in a pickle."

The Free Software Foundation (FSF), charged to promote the Gal's philosophy and tackle potential violations in court, strongly disputed SCO's assertions. It's just rubbish," said attorney and Columbia Law School professor Been Mogen. "There's nothing about giving permission to copy, modify or redistribute that violates the U.S. Constitution or any other law of the United States."

SCO offered no details in its court filing, but it said in a statement, "Article 1 Section 8 of the U.S. copyright law says that Congress can regulate copyrights, not the FSF or any other organization." BM appeared unfazed. "IBM strongly believes in its counterclaims and looks forward to trying its case in the court of law," where IBM will address SCO's specific claims, such as the GPL issue, spokesman Mike Darcy said.

Numerous open-source projects besides the core, or kernel, of Linux employ the GPL, including the Open Office desktop software suite, the Game instant messenger software and the Snort intrusion detection program. Richard Stallman created the GPL in the 1980s to govern the Gnu's Not UNIX (GNU) software project to clone UNIX. The license permits anyone to see, for more detail visit www.offline-promotion.com modify and distribute a program's underlying source code, as long as the author of the modifications publishes them when distributing the modified version.

And SCO itself is no stranger to the GPL. Until May, it sold its own version of Linux, and to this day it includes GPL-covered software in its two UNIX products, UnixWare and Open Server. If the GPL is declared void, for more detail visit www.the20seotools.com SCO could be among those damaged, Byre said. "The software under the GPL is copyrighted. Absent the GPL, the licensee has no right to use the copyrighted subject matter," Byre said.

SCO shook the computing world when it began its legal action against IBM in March. The lawsuit pits the London, Utah-based company, owner of key UNIX copyrights, against both the largest computing company and the most prominent corporate advocate of the Linux operating system.