SCO Lawsuit Information

The SCO lawsuit is a civil case where one giant corporation is suing another for legal uncertainties over the use of the Linux operating system. This is based on supposed violation of IBM's Unix licenses in developing Linux code.

SCO Overview

This all got started in 2003 when Caldera Systems, now known as the SCO Group, filed a $1 billion lawsuit against IBM. The suit alleged IBM devalued its version of the Linux operating system. Over time the amount of damages sought crept up to $5 billion.

The foundation of the SCO lawsuit was that allegedly IBM contributed SCO's intellectual property to the code base of the open source, Unix-like Linux operating system. This was apparently done without authorization.

The SCO Group sent letters to members of the Fortune 1000 and Global 500 companies in 2003 warning them they may be liable for using Linux. From there things more or less deteriorated into a dogfight with claims and counter claims, and with IBM and Red Hat (Linux distributor) filing counter suits.

SCO told Linux users they'd be in trouble if they didn't take out SCO Unix licenses and SCO started a lawsuit against Novell, AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler. Several trial dates were set and then re-set until it was decided the outcome of SCO v. Novell (in 2006) would settle issues relevant to SCO v. IBM. There were so many SCO lawsuits, it was hard to keep track of who was suing whom.

SCO Lawsuits & Other Legal Issues

A ruling in the SCO v. Novell case came down August 10, 2007 - the winners were Novell. The court said Novell was the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system, not the SCO Group.

The initial SCO lawsuit had several alleged causes of action including interference with a contract and business relationships; copyright infringement; breach of IBM software agreement and breach of IBM sublicensing agreement; and breach of Sequent software agreement and sublicensing agreement.

The compounding difficulty in this case is SCO reportedly changed its claims many times, but won't allow anyone access to the samples of code they say have been taken - the alleged copyright violation - unless a Non-disclosure agreement is signed. Subsequently two short snippets of code were presented at an SCO reseller's convention in 2003.

The main difficulty in SCO's suit appears to be the uncertainty of anything really being stolen, as SCO has also backtracked and stated that perhaps the dispute really lies in "methods and concepts" rather than stolen lines of code.

The SCO lawsuit allegations relate to the following components of the Linux kernel:

* Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP)

* Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) multiprocessing

* The read-copy-update (RCU) locking strategy - This technique is widely believed to have been developed at Sequent Computer Systems, who were then bought by IBM, who holds several patents (including patent 5,442,758) on this technique.

* SGI's Extended File System (XFS)

* IBM's JFS journaling file system




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