this post was submitted on 23 May 2025
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SCO crashed and burned in part because they tried to sue multiple Linux providers claiming that they owned all the rights to certain pieces of code that they'd contractually leased from IBM, and that IBM giving code to Linux distributors violated the terms of their agreement with IBM. It was a lawsuit that dragged on for over a decade and a half--I think that it's still going--and it's bled SCO of tens of millions of dollars ,esp. since they've lost nearly every single claim they've made.
Msft funded them for a while to do this:
https://www.networkcomputing.com/data-center-networking/microsoft-s-ties-to-sco-confirmed-by-investment-group
They tried to use the DMCA for header files in the source. https://linux.slashdot.org/story/03/12/22/1815224/sco-invokes-dmca-names-headers-novell-steps-in
SCO always reminds me of this:
https://read.gov/aesop/026.html
SCO Unix was mostly dead before then (not fully dead, just smelled like it). They were never the most popular Unix vendor to begin with. Caldera--a commercial Linux distro--had bought them out, and that's when the legal trouble started.
All those old vendors tended to have one specific thing they were really good at. IIRC, the thing for SCO was that they could load up hundreds of users on a single box on 1990s hardware. No small feat when the traditional Unix model needs to
fork()a process for login/shell/whatever.It's been a long time since I worked on that case, and I only did a very small part working on the discovery documents, so I've forgotten a lot, and had a lot of details a little confused. :)
It sounds like it was probably one of the seminal patent troll cases.
Copyright, yes. And a lot of this is corporate history rather than the legal portion.