Tux Machines

The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later (UPDATED)

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 07, 2023,

updated Mar 18, 2023

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On March 7, 2003, a struggling company called The SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM, claiming that the success of Linux was the result of a theft of SCO's technology. Two decades later, it is easy to look back on that incident as a somewhat humorous side-story in the development of Linux. At the time, though, it shook our community to its foundations. It is hard to overestimate how much the community we find ourselves in now was shaped by a ridiculous lawsuit 20 years ago.

SCO claimed to be the owner of the Unix operating system which, it said, was the power behind the "global technology economy"; the company sold a proprietary Unix system that ran on x86 hardware. By that point, of course, the heyday of proprietary Unix was already well in the past, and SCO's offerings were not doing particularly well. The reason for that, SCO reasoned, was the growth of Linux — which was true to a point, though Windows had been pushing a lot of Unix systems aside for years.

Read on

=> ↺ Read On: LWN

Slashdot discussion: The SCO Lawsuit: Looking Back 20 Years Later

=> ↺ The SCO Lawsuit: Looking Back 20 Years Later

UPDATE

SJVN:

The SCO vs. Linux Saga: 20 Years of Open-Source Turmoil

=> ↺ The SCO vs. Linux Saga: 20 Years of Open-Source Turmoil

Today, many Linux users would be shocked to know that there was once a lawsuit aimed squarely at Linux's heart: Its intellectual property (IP). Some people even thought SCO's lawsuit against IBM might end Linux. That didn't happen, but it did make the Linux community realize it had to understand its IP's legal and source code history.

Curiously, The SCO Group had started as an x86 Unix company. SCO was then acquired in a complex deal in August 2000 by Caldera, then a leading Linux company. The plan, as Ransom Love, then Caldera's CEO, "was to see how Unix could expand and extend Linux." That was not what happened.

Instead, the combined company was renamed SCO, and a new CEO Darl McBride was appointed. McBride then led SCO's legal assault on IBM and Linux. To sum up his start and tenure, a former McBride co-worker, said it best, "Congratulations. In a few short months, you've dethroned Bill Gates as the most hated man in the industry." That was true.

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