In the forum posting, Marsh said the company continued to fully support the open source movement.

The SCO Group alleges that companies such as EV1Servers, which operates two data center facilities housing 18,000 Windows and Linux dedicated servers, violate its intellectual property rights when they do not properly license SCO-owned UNIX code found in the Linux kernel.

Marsh stressed that protecting EV1Servers customers from the high cost of legal action, successful or not, was a key factor in the decision. "These suits have a very real and significant cost, even if proven unsuccessful," he said. "The vast majority of smaller hosts using our services do not have our resources to defend/prosecute such an action. While our decision may not be popular, it does ensure that our customers (to the extent that they operate servers in our data centers) are protected from action by SCO with respect to those servers."

Ryan Elledge, president of iNET Interactive, said in a post on webhostingtalk.com today that a pre-recorded interview with Robert Marsh will air on WHTRadio.com on Wednesday, March 10. Elledge said topics for discussion will include the SCO licensing issue and the opening of a new EV1Servers data center that is slated for later this week.