The long legal battle over ownership of Linux is closer than ever to ending, after a panel of three judges ruled a claim against IBM and Red Hat isn't valid, and that time has expired for further action.
This story starts in 1998 when IBM decided the world needed a single version of UNIX capable of running on multiple processor architectures. To make that happen, Big Blue allied with a company called the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) which made a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Intel and Sequent also signed up for the multi-architecture effort, called "Project Monterey."
The alliance didn't work, largely because Linux came along and delivered a *Nix that ran on multiple processors (and introduced a new way to develop software).
IBM decided to add some of the code developed during Project Monterey to Linux, leading SCO and its legal successors to claim they owned that code and therefore had some sort of legal claim over Linux.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday August 25, @02:00PM (3 children)
If my aging memory is correct, the lawsuit from SCO was on March 6, 2003. I remember reading and enjoying Groklaw for years. And I learned a lot from it. It was interesting to read the actual court filings. To have it explained how court procedure actually works.
I remember how SCO drug this out for years and years.
SCO boasted about how anxious they were for a trial. Their trial was finally scheduled for Monday Sept. 17, 2007. But on Friday afternoon (Sept 14), SCO filed for bankruptcy. They didn't want their trial so badly after all.
There is sooo much more to this twisted sorded tale that went on for what seemed like forever.
One great outcome was that the SCO lawsuit galvanized the entire open source community and all open source projects to wake up and make sure they have all the provenance of their copyrights in order. Modern open source control systems make it easy to see who contributed what and when, to fend off claims like this in the future.
Revolver, or semi automatic modified to be fully automatic -- which is best for senior citizens in their porch swings?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by VLM on Wednesday August 26, @01:47PM
Who is "they" as in "their"?
Remember this wasn't so much a legal story as a financial story.
Who funded SCO in the mid 00s? Microsoft and Baystar Capital and to a lesser extent Sun Microsystems funded SCO's legal department.
Once it was clear the case wouldn't be producing future marketing FUD, the funding dried up and the legal case blew away in the wind.
Remember it was those three companies going after linux, sco was just their hired/purchased weapon.
If you're bored look it up on the wikipedia. It was basically a well funded marketing campaign. There was never really a serious legal case.
(Score: 2, Informative) by steveg on Thursday August 27, @03:41PM (1 child)
It's also worth noting that SCO wasn't the same as "The Santa Cruz Operation".
The detail are fuzzy in my memory (it's been a couple of years) but as I recall, somebody bought Caldera Linux, who bought some assets from Santa Cruz Operation, and then renamed themselves "The SCO Group".
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 27, @09:44PM
That is one of many ways SCO tried to cloud who it was to create uncertainty about the ownership of Unix.
Revolver, or semi automatic modified to be fully automatic -- which is best for senior citizens in their porch swings?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Ingar on Tuesday August 25, @02:05PM (3 children)
SCO doesn't.
Love is a three-edged sword: heart, soul, and reality.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Username on Tuesday August 25, @02:11PM
I own Linux.
It was given to me by god.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25, @03:10PM
Doesn't matter, even with the entire cadaver completey entombed, all they need is a judge to sign off.
I think this is fascinating. Is SCO a zombie or a vampire? Will the Groklaw girl be resurrected also?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25, @03:38PM
The world is my oyster. Linux is part of my world, so it's MINE!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bentonite on Wednesday August 26, @04:01AM (2 children)
The claims about code that SCO claimed copyright over ending up in Linux is totally false - all SCO could ever present was a few lines in time.h that were kind of similar - but even the judge (judges tend to be very competent at legal brain damage, but very incompetent at logical thinking) wasn't impressed and said something along the lines of "is this all you got?".
If I'm thinking of the relevant code, it was additionally found that SCO wasn't the copyright holder of code it was claiming copyright over - it was Novell.
The whole case was just complete FUD about the GNU OS - the whole idea was that there was no way such free software OS was functionally better than proprietary Unix's - code must have been copied from proprietary Unix's.
The issue was, they couldn't find any copied code in GNU, as it was all written from scratch, then m$ joined the party and started funding the FUD, with instructions to never name the the GNU - instead to only say "Linux" (the kernel, Linux also didn't copy any code from proprietary Unix kernel's) - as well if more people learned that the free GNU OS existed and became aware of the reason why it existed, the freedom would have gone to 11.
After all the confusion evident, people still tell me with a straight face that it's less confusing to refer to GNU as "Linux", than to refer to GNU as GNU and Linux as Linux.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday August 26, @02:01PM (1 child)
There's like pages of strange claims in the wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes#UNIX_SVRx [wikipedia.org]
So that's somewhat simplified. But none of the claims were impressive.
The dueling slander of title lawsuits were particularly amusing.
Another funny one was when SCO claimed that when a predecessor company gave IBM a license described, and I quote from the license, "the irrevocable, fully paid-up, perpetual right" that use of the word irrevocable and perpetual means SCO can revoke it at any time, which they tried to do in the 00s. I don't remember that particular case going very well for SCO and its funders, LOL.
Years later, the judge kind of starts smacking SCO around, in my opinion this comes from behavior like the above, the wheels of justice move slowly but eventually grind rather finely and I think the legal system as a whole was tired of being used for marketing department purposes. Filing a lawsuit with a straight face that basically claims the word irrevocable means revocable, in the short term gets the PR and marketing depts excited, but in the long term its not going to end well when the legal system has their way with them.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Thursday August 27, @04:11AM
I was referring to the code in the kernel, Linux that SCO alleged was copied - not any claims totally unrelated to Linux.
The linked "UNIX SVRx" part doesn't mention anything relevant to Linux - it appears to rather a bunch of false claims over holding copyright over some code from some version of Unix.
But if you scroll down enough, you can see that meanwhile SCO was the one who copied code from GNU and Linux into "SCO UNIX", in violation of its licenses (the GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1+); https://web.archive.org/web/20100505065823/http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050809082902461 [archive.org]
It seems "SCO UNIX" had the functionality where you could run GNU software and the software for the GNU OS, with first only some parts of Linux and then soon after, without Linux.