The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later [LWN.net]
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The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later
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By Jonathan Corbet<br>March 3, 2023
On March 7, 2003, a struggling company called The SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM, claiming that the<br>success of Linux was the result of a theft of SCO's technology. Two<br>decades later, it is easy to look back on that incident as a somewhat<br>humorous side-story in the development of Linux. At the time, though, it<br>shook our community to its foundations. It is hard to overestimate how<br>much the community we find ourselves in now was shaped by a ridiculous<br>lawsuit 20 years ago.
SCO claimed to be the owner of the Unix<br>operating system which, it said, was the power behind the "global<br>technology economy"; the company sold a proprietary Unix system that ran on<br>x86 hardware. By that point, of course, the heyday of proprietary Unix was<br>already well in the past, and SCO's offerings were not doing particularly<br>well. The reason for that, SCO reasoned, was the growth of Linux — which<br>was true to a point, though Windows had been pushing a lot of Unix systems<br>aside for years. But Linux, SCO said, couldn't possibly have reached a<br>point where it threatened Unix on its own:
Prior to IBM's involvement, Linux was the software equivalent of a<br>bicycle. UNIX was the software equivalent of a luxury car. To make<br>Linux of necessary quality for use by enterprise customers, it must<br>be re-designed so that Linux also becomes the software equivalent<br>of a luxury car. This re-design is not technologically feasible or<br>even possible at the enterprise level without (1) a high degree of<br>design coordination, (2) access to expensive and sophisticated<br>design and testing equipment; (3) access to UNIX code, methods and<br>concepts; (4) UNIX architectural experience; and (5) a very<br>significant financial investment.
It was the claim of access to Unix code that was the most threatening<br>allegation for the Linux community. SCO made it clear that, in its<br>opinion, Linux was stolen property: "It is not possible for Linux to<br>rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise<br>functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or<br>concepts". To rectify this "misappropriation", SCO was asking for a<br>judgment of at least $1 billion, later increased to $5 billion.<br>As the suit dragged on, SCO also started suing Linux users as it tried to<br>collect a tax for use of the system.
Send in the clowns
Though this has never been proven, it was widely assumed at the time that<br>SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That<br>would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less<br>than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go<br>away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix — and, thus, Linux. To<br>SCO's management, it may well have seemed like a good idea at the time.
IBM, though, refused to play that game; the company had invested heavily<br>into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of<br>intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort. So the company,<br>instead, directed its not inconsiderable legal resources to squashing this<br>attack. But notably, so did the development community as a whole, as did<br>much of the rest of the technology industry.
Over the course of the following years — far too many years — SCO's case<br>fell to pieces. The "misappropriated" technology wasn't there. Due to<br>what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry<br>history, it turned out that SCO didn't even<br>own the Unix copyrights it was suing over. The level of buffoonery was<br>high from the beginning and got worse; the company lost at every turn and<br>eventually collapsed into bankruptcy.
At a talk some years ago, your editor got a good laugh by saying that, in<br>the SCO case, we had the good luck to be sued by idiots. SCO created a<br>great deal of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the industry, but a smarter<br>attack could have been a lot worse. Even as it was, this was a period when<br>SCO was making waves by threatening to sue any company using Linux — at a<br>time when our foothold was rather less well established than it is now.<br>Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly<br>bought licenses from the company. Magazines like Forbes were warning<br>the "Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement" that they<br>"should wake up". SCO was suggesting<br>a license fee of $1,399 — per-CPU — to run Linux.
All of this was a campaign to create a maximal level of fear around Linux<br>and, as a result, to put pressure on IBM to settle. It...