Open software developer Samba has accused the SCO Group of 'hypocrisy' for attacking the GNU General Purpose Licence (GPL) while incorporating software released under the licence into its products.

At this week's SCO Forum event, SCO chief executive, Darl McBride, attacked the GPL saying: "The GPL is not about making software free; it's about destroying value."

But in a statement posted on its website Wednesday, the Samba development team retorted: "It is the depths of hypocrisy that at the same event SCO also announced the incorporation of the Samba3 release into their latest OpenServer product."

The team members, who published their individual names at the foot of the statement, pointed out that Samba is an open source, free software project freely available under the GPL.

"We observe that SCO is both attacking the GPL on the one hand and benefiting from it on the other hand. SCO can't have it both ways," the statement said.

Samba allows Linux and Unix servers to interoperate with Microsoft Windows clients, providing file and print services.

The Samba team's statement continued: "Samba is developed and distributed under the GPL, in exactly the same manner as the Linux kernel code that SCO has been criticising for its lack of care in ownership attribution.

"Because of this, we believe that Samba must remain true to our principles and be freely available to use even in ways we personally disapprove of.

"Even when used by rank hypocrites like SCO."