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Totally Bogus News. This did NOT happen. Yet.

IBM and Red Hat Inc. today announced a partnership under which IBM will license Red Hat to develop and maintain IBM Linux, which Red Hat will also be free to distribute as Red Hat linux. The move follows a recent lawsuit filed by SCO Group, which alleged that linux contains unlicensed code from AT&T Unix, which it has purchased.

IBM has a fully paid, royalty-free, worldwide, perpetual license to Unix which it acquired from AT&T prior to the purchase of Unix by Novell, Inc..

"Whatever components of AT&T Unix might be in IBM linux, they are covered by our blanket Unix license. We look forward to working with Red Hat to distribute IBM linux worldwide," said an IBM spokesperson.

Red Hat übergeek John Whatisname said, "I guess this means those lawyers who bought SCO for the IP play are hosed. Too bad."

IBM has contributed lots of code to the kernel hackers, for both s/390 and Intel flavors. Everyone at IBM who touches open source code has received extensive training on the GPL and the various Unix licenses.

With all of the lawyers and management oversight entrenched throughout IBM, you'd better believe they would not be associated with Linux if they saw any liability whatsoever.