The SCO Group of Utah has had to backtrack after saying that MIT mathematicians verified its claims that Linux, the center of the popular and freely-available GNU/Linux operating system, is an illegal knock-off.

\ufffdThey said they hired three separate independent teams of experts to analyze their code, including one from MIT, and that the findings appear to corroborate the fact that the code had been taken from Unix and put into Linux,\ufffd said Laura DiDio, a senior analyst at The Yankee Group in Boston.

\ufffdIt was kind of weird, because they told me they had hired a team at MIT,\ufffd said Robert McMillan, a correspondent for the IDG News Service. \ufffdAnd then they kind of backpedaled.\ufffd

SCO Senior Vice President \ufffdChris Sontag told me that [they] had a group of mathemeticians \ufffdwho were at MIT\ufffd working on this,\ufffd McMillan wrote in an e-mail after checking his notes. \ufffdIn subsequent interviews SCO said that these guys had been at MIT and were no longer there.\ufffd

Paul Hatch, a SCO spokesman, wrote in a statement to The Tech, \ufffdTo clarify, the individuals reviewing the code had been involved with MIT labs in the past, but are not currently at MIT. Unfortunately, due to contractual obligations, we cannot specifically name the individuals.\ufffd

Later, SCO\ufffds director of corporate communications, Blake Stowell, confirmed that \ufffdat least one of the groups was a link to MIT\ufffd but did not respond to a request to make the experts available for interview.

Informal inquiries with the mathematics department did not find anyone who said they knew of a colleague working to verify SCO\ufffds assertions.