https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/924577/75ae0a1538029fcc/ LWN.net Logo LWN .net News from the source LWN * Content + Weekly Edition + Archives + Search + Kernel + Security + Events calendar + Unread comments + ------------------------------------------------------------- + LWN FAQ + Write for us User: [ ] Password: [ ] [Log in] | [Subscribe] | [Register] Subscribe / Log in / New account The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later [LWN subscriber-only content] Welcome to LWN.net Free trial subscription The following subscription-only Try LWN for free for 1 content has been made available to month: no payment or you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands credit card required. of subscribers depend on LWN for Activate your trial the best news from the Linux and subscription now and see free software communities. If you why thousands of readers enjoy this article, please consider subscribe to LWN.net. accepting the trial offer on the right. Thank you for visiting LWN.net! By Jonathan Corbet March 3, 2023 On March 7, 2003, a struggling company called The SCO Group filed a lawsuit against IBM, claiming that the success of Linux was the result of a theft of SCO's technology. Two decades later, it is easy to look back on that incident as a somewhat humorous side-story in the development of Linux. At the time, though, it shook our community to its foundations. It is hard to overestimate how much the community we find ourselves in now was shaped by a ridiculous lawsuit 20 years ago. SCO claimed to be the owner of the Unix operating system which, it said, was the power behind the "global technology economy"; the company sold a proprietary Unix system that ran on x86 hardware. By that point, of course, the heyday of proprietary Unix was already well in the past, and SCO's offerings were not doing particularly well. The reason for that, SCO reasoned, was the growth of Linux -- which was true to a point, though Windows had been pushing a lot of Unix systems aside for years. But Linux, SCO said, couldn't possibly have reached a point where it threatened Unix on its own: Prior to IBM's involvement, Linux was the software equivalent of a bicycle. UNIX was the software equivalent of a luxury car. To make Linux of necessary quality for use by enterprise customers, it must be re-designed so that Linux also becomes the software equivalent of a luxury car. This re-design is not technologically feasible or even possible at the enterprise level without (1) a high degree of design coordination, (2) access to expensive and sophisticated design and testing equipment; (3) access to UNIX code, methods and concepts; (4) UNIX architectural experience; and (5) a very significant financial investment. It was the claim of access to Unix code that was the most threatening allegation for the Linux community. SCO made it clear that, in its opinion, Linux was stolen property: "`It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts'". To rectify this "misappropriation", SCO was asking for a judgment of at least $1 billion, later increased to $5 billion. As the suit dragged on, SCO also started suing Linux users as it tried to 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 SCO's real objective was to prod IBM into acquiring the company. That would have solved SCO's ongoing business problems and IBM, for rather less than the amount demanded in court, could have made an annoying problem go away and also lay claim to the ownership of Unix -- and, thus, Linux. To 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 into Linux in its early days and was uninterested in allowing any sort of intellectual-property taint to attach to that effort. So the company, instead, directed its not inconsiderable legal resources to squashing this attack. But notably, so did the development community as a whole, as did much of the rest of the technology industry. Over the course of the following years -- far too many years -- SCO's case fell to pieces. The "misappropriated" technology wasn't there. Due to what must be one of the worst-written contracts in technology-industry history, it turned out that SCO didn't even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over. The level of buffoonery was high from the beginning and got worse; the company lost at every turn and eventually collapsed into bankruptcy. At a talk some years ago, your editor got a good laugh by saying that, in the SCO case, we had the good luck to be sued by idiots. SCO created a great deal of fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the industry, but a smarter attack could have been a lot worse. Even as it was, this was a period when SCO was making waves by threatening to sue any company using Linux -- at a time when our foothold was rather less well established than it is now. Microsoft, which had not yet learned to love Linux, funded SCO and loudly bought licenses from the company. Magazines like Forbes were warning the "`Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement'" that they "`should wake up'". SCO was suggesting 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 and, as a result, to put pressure on IBM to settle. It certainly succeeded to an extent. Such an effort, in less incompetent hands, could easily have damaged Linux badly. As it went, SCO, despite its best efforts, instead succeeded in improving the position of Linux -- in development, legal, and economic terms -- considerably. The enduring effects Consider the charge of directly-copied source code -- one that SCO CEO Darl McBride loudly made in May of that year. At the time, there was not a lot of oversight applied to code going into the kernel; the project had only just begun using BitKeeper as its first version-control system, after all, and the maintainer hierarchy that has served the project so well was in its infancy. It seemed almost inevitable that, among the millions of lines of code poured into the kernel from an unknown number of sources, some would be found to have been copied from Unix; source for various Unix distributions was not hard to come by in those days. Richard Stallman allowed that: "`In a community of over half a million developers, we can hardly expect that there will never be plagiarism'". The real question seemed be just how bad the damage would turn out to be. The world waited for McBride to actually show all this copied code -- sometimes said to be "millions of lines" -- that he had found. The actual code turned out to be a snippet in the ia64 architecture subsystem. It undoubtedly shouldn't have been there; interestingly, it had already been removed by the time SCO fingered it. Beyond that, SCO's claims touched on code -- read-copy-update and the Berkeley packet filter, for example -- that could not possibly have come from anything it owned. When SCO was asked to put up its evidence, all that came out was a bunch of handwaving. The important part is this, though: SCO's efforts and those it inspired put the Linux kernel code under the sort of microscope that few projects ever see. There were allegedly billions of dollars at stake, after all. But despite that incentive and all of the resources poured into inspecting the kernel source, nobody ever found all that copied code; it simply did not exist. SCO managed to prove the cleanliness of the kernel's pedigree in a far more convincing way than anybody else could have. Nobody now questions the legitimacy of the kernel's source code. Another thing that is no longer questioned is the need for the free-software community to have lawyers on its side. It is not enough to be right; we have to be able to prove that we are right and deter potential attackers. The SCO lawsuit brought about a substantial increase in the legal resources available to the community, both within companies and in projects and related organizations. Anybody who hopes to extract rents from the free-software community now will face a strong, united, and capable defense. A related change is the improved procedures that the community has adopted; just because SCO proved that the kernel's code was clean doesn't mean it will always be. The adoption of the developer's certificate of origin for kernel code is one obvious example; its purpose was to avoid the next SCO case. As Linus Torvalds said at the time: People have been pretty good (understatement of the year) at debunking those claims, but the fact is that part of that debunking involved searching kernel mailing list archives from 1992 etc. Not much fun. For example, in the case of "ctype.h", what made it so clear that it was original work was the horrible bugs it contained originally, and since we obviously don't do bugs any more (right?), we should probably plan on having other ways to document the origin of the code. So, to avoid these kinds of issues ten years from now, I'm suggesting that we put in more of a process to explicitly document not only where a patch comes from (which we do actually already document pretty well in the changelogs), but the path it came through. Many other projects have adopted similar procedures, most of which have the happy result of documenting the provenance of code without imposing heavy bureaucracy on the process. Efforts like SPDX are also partially motivated by the desire to avoid another SCO. Long live the long-hair smellies Perhaps the most significant outcome of this whole episode, though, is what it revealed about our community. If SCO wanted to scare developers and users into fleeing Linux, it certainly failed. While IBM waged a devastating campaign in the courts, it often seemed like many of the battles were won in the wider community; it turns out that, when thousands of developers and users join a fight against a common enemy, they can do amazing things. Developers from across the community (occasionally referred to within SCO as the "long-hair smellies") put their time into debunking SCO's code-ownership claims, to great effect. Resources like Groklaw marshaled information for the defense and, just as importantly, informed the community about what was at stake and how the system works. Encouraged by this work, users stuck with Linux and refused to pay SCO's licensing demands. It was not just IBM's lawyers and money that won this fight; it was a widespread community that had built something special and had no intention of letting a failing company steal it. Twenty years later, it is fair to say that Linux is doing a little better than The SCO Group. Its swaggering leader, who thought to make his fortune by taxing Linux, filed for personal bankruptcy in 2020. We survived a focused and determined attack that would have brought an end to many other enterprises, regardless of the injustice involved. But the SCO attack should never be forgotten, because of the ways that it changed our community, but also because, despite our much stronger position now, it could happen again. The Linux community has created a vast amount of wealth, whether measured in code or in actual money; when that happens, there will always be those who wish to steal some of that wealth. Hopefully we will be as lucky when the time comes to fend off the next one. [Send a free link] Did you like this article? Please accept our trial subscription offer to be able to see more content like it and to participate in the discussion. ----------------------------------------- (Log in to post comments) Darl McVader Posted Mar 3, 2023 15:47 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] As I was digging through old stuff for this article, I ran across this bit of fun that I had long since forgotten about. There wasn't a place for it in the article, but hopefully it can bring a smile or two still... [Reply to this comment] Darl McVader Posted Mar 3, 2023 16:23 UTC (Fri) by dullfire (subscriber, #111432) [Link] LOL. yes that is pretty good. Thanks, for writing it (though it's a bit late), and linking here. [Reply to this comment] Darl McVader Posted Mar 3, 2023 16:36 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [ Link] >EPISODE 1: THE PATCHBOMB MENACE >To be written in about 20 years Well, how that turned out. Just look at the numbers at https:// lkml.org/lkml . More patches than ever! [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 17:10 UTC (Fri) by PaulMcKenney (subscriber, # 9624) [Link] Boy, does this one bring back memories! ;-) [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 18:47 UTC (Fri) by rweikusat2 (subscriber, # 117920) [Link] By that time, I rechristened SCO from Santa Cruz Operation to Santa Claus Operation and I still think this was highly appropriate. :-) [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 19:00 UTC (Fri) by zeekec (subscriber, #2414) [ Link] I miss Groklaw. It still sits in Akregator, waiting for the next post to come. [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 19:57 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore ( supporter , #75) [ Link] I miss Groklaw, too, but I think part of the decision to shut it down was that it just wasn't as critical anymore. By the time the shutdown happened, it was pretty clear the lawsuit was going to fail eventually. It was all about how that was going to happen, not whether, and that made it a lot less interesting. [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 19:05 UTC (Fri) by flussence (subscriber, #85566) [Link] Gee, they weren't wrong about the car analogy though. UNIX is high cost, high maintenance, a gas guzzler, obsolete as soon as it drives off the lot. Ballmer-Microsoft of course being Car Culture itself and pushing for child-mowing jacked up luxury trucks and 24 lane gridlocked highways to hell, which is why they fed SCO tens of millions of bucks (I vaguely recall "20 million" mentioned once, but I'm sure the final amount was far higher). They really feel threatened by that bicycle, and what it represents. [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 21:47 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax ( supporter , #52523) [Link] Be careful with analogies. Those 24-lane highways enable commutes that are faster than in any of "transit heaven" large cities. I was surprised at first when I learned this, but it's true. [Reply to this comment] Status of the original lawsuit Posted Mar 3, 2023 19:23 UTC (Fri) by huntermatthews (subscriber, # 4490) [Link] What is the status of the lawsuit today? I recall that it dragged on long after Groklaw ended. [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 19:52 UTC (Fri) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [ Link] I went down a mild rabbit hole trying to figure out what Darl McBride is up to today. Wikipedia says he's CEO of "Shout TV," some sort of mobile trivia startup, but that seems to be out of date. Shout TV got acquired by "MMA Global Inc," in 2018, and McBride became CEO of MMA Global, a position from which he stepped down in 2021. MMA Global, previously "Louisiana Food Company," is now a cryptocurrency/NFT/ influencer/something company called "Zuki." McBride appears to still be a director of Zuki. At the bottom of https://zuki.app/intro-1 are some PDFs with some info about this corporate structure. I wonder if NFTs and handwavy cryptocurrency coins will be more profitable for him than selling Linux licenses. [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 20:43 UTC (Fri) by biergaizi (subscriber, #92498) [Link] > it turned out that SCO didn't even own the Unix copyrights it was suing over. This is potentially a huge problem that affects the copyright status of the historical Research Unix and BSD code, but strangely nobody is talking about it or made any clarification. As a result, although it's already 47 years since the initial publication of John Lions' book, I think its copyright status is still clear as mud because of the SCO affair. Nowadays, everyone just assumed that historical Unix code is completely free under a BSD-like license, for example, this is claimed by both Wikipedia and The Unix Heritage Society (TUHS). > Fortunately, much of the historical Unix source code, including the research versions up to 7th Edition and many of the BSDs, are available in the Unix Archive and are covered by the Caldera license. This is essentially a BSD license and allows you to read, modify and distribute the source code. You can find several original Unix recreations in emulators and also ports to modern platforms (like RISC-V or PIC) as technical demonstrations and history exhibition, under the assumption that the code is safe to work with. However, this Unix license was granted by the CEO of Caldera (i.e. the new SCO who started the lawsuits). If SCO didn't even own the Unix copyrights, is this license still valid? The Unix Heritage Society needs to clarify this problem, if it's found to be invalid, a petition to relicense Ancient Unix should be made to the current Unix copyright holder (Novell?) for the sake of history preservation. [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 22:23 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] I think you need to dig up the AT&T/BSD settlement. Pretty much everything you've said is handwaving to cover over the fact that huge chunks of copyright were never AT&T's in the first place, so all this stuff about Novell, and "the current Unix owner", and the Caldera licence, and and and is just hot air. Simply put, the settlement between AT&T and BSD said "AT&T has pretty much *no* enforceable copyrights whatsoever", and AT&T managed to get a non-disclosure settlement out of BSD in return for walking away from the case, and probably paying most or all of BSD's costs. Depending on what you mean by "Unix", huge chunks of it were written by the University Lions worked at in Australia, and had that University's copyrights plastered over it. Other huge chunks had University College London copyrights plastered over it, and yet more had, unsurprisingly, Berkeley copyrights plastered all over it. AT&T removed the lot. And when they sued Berkely they made the mistake of suing Berkeley for a lot of code that Berkeley could prove *they* wrote. So pretty early into the suit, the Judge issued an opinion that said, effectively, "if your record keeping is that bad that you sued Berkeley for stealing their own code, you've just proved your record keeping is worthless and cannot be trusted. You are going to have to provide a proven history for EVERY SINGLE LINE you want to sue over". And AT&T didn't have said history. So Novell effectively bought a "quitclaim" to the Unix code, and an NDA that said no-one would talk about who actually owned it. AT&T didn't have any defensible copyrights, and the other three main copyright holders (a) probably didn't know what they owned, and (b) had no desire to sue over it, either. (Especially as all three had, I believe, used BSD or BSD-style licences.) If you want to clarify the copyrights, please do, but it'll be an Augean Stables job ... I don't think you'll find a Hercules to help ... Cheers, Wol [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 21:31 UTC (Fri) by cjs (subscriber, #45842) [Link] Ah the Good 'ol Days.... What is interesting is that they didn't choose to embrace Linux and developed their own distro... At any rate, Groklaw did a great job covering the case for those interested.. http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2003101... [Reply to this comment] The SCO lawsuit, 20 years later Posted Mar 3, 2023 22:38 UTC (Fri) by grahamm (guest, #163964) [Link] I believe there was a "SCO Linux" distro but was too late to the party (I left SCOC in 2000 and had nothing to do with SCOX which is an embarrassing blot the SCO history). [Reply to this comment] Copyright (c) 2023, Eklektix, Inc. Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds