"We make no endorsement of SCO nor do we make any admission as to their claims," said EV1's CEO Robert Marsh in a letter to customers - a statement which did not head off the inevitable knee-jerk reaction such as a call for a boycott of EV1 Servers, which has 18,000 Windows and Linux dedicated servers.

But the EV1 announcement earlier this week of the purchase of UNIX licenses from SCO is nothing compared to yesterday's copyright infringement lawsuit announcement: the first against an end user of Linux: car parts retailer AutoZone. 

AutoZone was named in the first lawsuit and SCO is seeking damages for unauthorised use of its intellectual property - specifically,  for porting its inventory/kiosk applications to Linux, with IBM's help, allegedly by using SCO shared libraries that AutoZone didn't have the rights to.

EV1's Marsh as good as admitted yesterday that the blackmail element in SCO strategy is paying off when he stressed that protecting EV1Servers customers from the high cost of legal action, successful or not, was a key factor in the decision, saying: 

"These suits have a very real and significant cost, even if proven unsuccessful."

So now it is AutoZone's turn to decide how to respond to SCO's suit, which comes two weeks after its self-imposed deadline for suing an end user of Linux. In fact SCO CEO Darl McBride, during a session on Monday at the Software 2004 conference in San Francisco, announced that his company had  two targets lined up - so AutoZone won't be alone.

While SCO spokesman Blake Stowell has admitted that the EV1 Servers licenses was negotiated at a substantial discount to the $699 per server SCO was asking, this week certainly is shaping up to be the make-or-break week for SCO. The SCO suit against AutoZone was filed in the U.S. District Court in Nevada and asks for injunctive relief and damages - to be determined in a trial.

Expert opinion is that SCO could seek statutory damages, were it win its case, in the $200 to $150,000 per infringement range.

Stand by here at LinuxWorld for some choice reactions from the Linux community! One of the first came from SysAdmin Pekka Saaru, from Finland, who says indignantly:

The case IS NOT ABOUT LINUX. It is about SCO claiming that  Autozone are using SCO SHARED LIBRARIES IN A WAY THEY'RE  NOT LICENSED TO.

Please do not write disinformation like this on your site!  Pekka Saari

• SCO Sues DaimlerChrysler & AutoZone
• IBM CEO Ordered to Turn Over Linux Secrets to SCO
• SCO in the News: Facts Update - As Rumors Swirl
• SCO Makes Q3 Loss, McBride Vows to Continue Fighting IBM and Others