A founder of BayStar Capital Management has submitted a sworn statement to the US District Court in Utah, in which he claims Microsoft wished to underhandedly promote SCO and its lawsuit against IBM about the Linux operating system kernel.
In a submission to the Utah Division of the Court, Lawrence Goldfarb, founder and managing member of BayStar Capital Management, says Richard Emerson, Microsoft`s senor VP for corporate development and strategy, approached him in 2003 with a view to investing in SCO without drawing attention to the fact that it was attacking IBM or Linux.
SCO filed suit against IBM in March 2003, claiming damages from IBM for breach of contract and misappropriation of intellectual property, as well as alleging that IBM had copied millions of lines of proprietary Unix code into the 2.4 version of the Linux kernel. BayStar invested $50 million in SCO in 2003, prompting widespread speculation of Microsoft`s influence behind the scenes. The claims received a boost when a memo from external consultant Michael Anderer was leaked in which he claimed to be brokering a deal between the Redmond giant and BayStar.
Transparent
IBM submitted the Goldfarb declaration as one of its pieces of evidence supporting an amended memorandum in support of a motion for summary judgment on SCO`s claims that IBM interfered with its business. SCO`s claims have been widely disputed by the free and open source software community because of the transparent nature of the development process and because the Utah company has yet to produce any evidence that it owns the Unix code base or that wide-scale copying took place.
"Mr Emerson stated that Microsoft wished to promote SCO and its pending lawsuit about IBM and the Linux operating system," wrote Goldfarb. "But Microsoft did not want to be seen as attacking IBM or Linux. For that reason, Microsoft wanted to further its interest through independent investors like BayStar."
Microsoft has denied that it agreed to guarantee any of BayStar`s investments in SCO and said in a statement issued this week that the BayStar declaration "confirms that".
"The BayStar declaration confirms that no guarantee was ever provided," said an official statement from the company. "Microsoft does have a deal with SCO that has been widely reported. We paid SCO for licensing rights to ensure IT interoperability for Unix migration technology, currently in use in Microsoft Utilities for Unix-based applications."
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