Moreover, a href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1455153,00.asp">subsequent letter
sent to U.S. elected officials expanded on SCO's
vision of the GPL. McBride declared that open-source software is a threat to the
country's IT industry, to national security and to the ability of the country to
compete in the global economic market.

"I urge you to consider the other side because I believe that open source, as
it is currently constituted, is a slippery slope," McBride wrote to legislators
in January. "It undermines our basic system of intellectual property rights, and
it destroys the economic reason for innovation.

"By taking action, our company has become a target for sometimes vicious
attacks-including online attacks that have repeatedly shut down our company Web
site," McBride continued in his letter to federal officials. "Despite this, we
are determined to see these legal cases through to the end because we are firm
in our belief that the unchecked spread of open-source software, under the GPL,
is a much more serious threat to our capitalist system than U.S corporations
realize."

src="http://common.ziffdavisinternet.com/util_get_image/2/0,1311,i=28571,00.gif"
width=28 align=left border=0>href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1467169,00.asp">Click here to
read more about MyDoom's DDoS attacks on SCO.

However, in this week's filing, called href="http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/IBM-141-1.pdf">SCO's Answer to IBM's Second
Amended Counterclaims, here in PDF form, it appears that Lindon, Utah-based
SCO is no longer stating in court that one reason why it should win is that "the
GPL violates the U.S. Constitution, together with copyright, antitrust and
export-control laws, and IBM's claims based thereon, or related thereto, are
barred."

SCO's earlier contention that the GPL is unconstitutional href="http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1409489,00.asp">sparked controversy
and brought cries of outrage from Linux and
open-source supporters.

Many lawyers, such as Tom Carey, a partner at href="http://www.bromsun.com/">Bromberg & Sunstein LLP, a Boston
intellectual property law firm, have said they found SCO's assertion that the
GPL is unconstitutional to be "rubbish."

Open-source advocates said they are delighted by the news. Bradley M. Kuhn,
executive director of the Free Software
Foundation, the organization behind the GPL, said, "We are, of course, glad
that SCO has heard our answers to those questions and realized that they have no
basis whatsoever to make those claims."