The SCO Group

» see sco.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Darl McBride became chief executive of Caldera International on 27 June 2002. Caldera sold a Linux distribution and had bought the Unix business of the Santa Cruz Operation the year before, which left it holding an old and complicated pile of AT&T contracts. Two months later, at a conference in Las Vegas, the company renamed itself The SCO Group and adopted the identity of the thing it had purchased. Within a year it had stopped being a software vendor in any meaningful sense and become a litigation vehicle.

The theory was that IBM had taken Unix System V code that SCO owned and put it into Linux, and that every company running Linux was therefore using stolen property. SCOsource launched on 22 January 2003 to sell those companies a license. The lawsuit against IBM followed on 6 March 2003, asking for at least a billion dollars and later amended upward to five. Demand letters went out to roughly 1,500 large corporations. Microsoft and Sun both bought SCOsource licenses that year, which put cash into the company at the moment it most needed it and has been argued about ever since.

The problem was never proven and, as it turned out, could not be. SCO never produced the infringing code in a form that survived examination, and Novell said publicly that it had never transferred the Unix copyrights to Santa Cruz Operation in the first place. On 10 August 2007 Judge Dale Kimball agreed with Novell. Everything SCO had been selling for four years rested on ownership it did not have.

I was a computer engineering student while this ran, and it was the loudest thing happening in the part of the industry I was reading about. No machine I ever touched in Ankara ran SCO Unix. Nobody I knew had a reason to care whether the copyrights sat with Novell or Lindon, Utah. It landed as news rather than as a bill, which is the only reason it was entertaining.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it played out in public ~

The case produced Groklaw, which is the genuinely unusual part. Pamela Jones, a paralegal, started publishing the court filings with annotations explaining what each one actually meant, and a crowd of programmers showed up to help read them. It turned into the most thorough public legal archive the software industry has ever had, and it did something the defendants' lawyers could not: it made the specific claims legible to the people being accused, in real time, for free.

The other public artifact is a magazine cover. Businessweek ran a piece in February 2004 headlined around SCO being the most hated company in tech, which the company treated as a badge. McBride gave a great many interviews. The open letters he wrote to the open source community were widely reproduced, mostly by people quoting them back with commentary.

~ how it actually ended ~

SCO filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware on 14 September 2007, five weeks after the Kimball ruling and on the eve of a trial over damages owed to Novell. It stayed in bankruptcy for five years. A trustee sold the actual Unix products to a company called UnXis in 2011, which left the estate with no operations at all and one remaining asset, the claims against IBM. On 6 August 2012 the trustee moved to convert the case to Chapter 7 and liquidate, having admitted in the filing that there was no business and no money to fund the litigation either.

The IBM piece limped on for another nine years under the name TSG Group. It settled in November 2021 for fourteen and a quarter million dollars paid to the creditors, against an original demand of five billion. That is a recovery of about a quarter of one percent of the ask, arriving eighteen years after the complaint.

~ what came after ~

The lasting effect was the opposite of the intent. SCO wanted to establish that Linux carried unlicensed Unix code and that enterprises took a legal risk by deploying it. What the decade produced instead was a fully litigated public record showing that the claim did not hold, plus indemnification promises from every major vendor, plus the Open Invention Network. Enterprise Linux adoption accelerated through the exact years of the lawsuit.

There is a smaller echo still going. Xinuos, which ended up with the Unix assets after promising not to litigate over them, sued IBM and Red Hat in March 2021 over Project Monterey. Some pieces of code apparently cannot be buried, only reassigned.

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