Not Quite Dead: SCO Linux Suit Against IBM Stirs In Utah

An anonymous reader points to a story in the Salt Lake Tribune which says that The nearly defunct Utah company SCO Group Inc. and IBM filed a joint report to the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City saying that legal issues remain in the case, which was initiated in 2003 with SCO claiming damages of $5 billion against the technology giant, based in Armonk, N.Y. That likely means that U.S. District Judge David Nuffer, who now presides over the dispute, will start moving the lawsuit — largely dormant for about four years while a related suit against Novell Inc. was adjudicated — ahead. What kind of issues? In addition to its claims of IBM misappropriation of code, SCO alleges that IBM executives and lawyers directed the company's Linux programmers to destroy source code on their computers after SCO made its allegations. The company's other remaining claims are that IBM's actions amounted to unfair competition and interference with its contracts and business relations with other companies. IBM has remaining claims against SCO that allege the Utah company violated contracts, copied and distributed IBM code that had been placed in Linux and that SCO created a campaign of "fear, uncertainty and doubt" about IBM's products and services because of the dispute over Unix code.

Comments

Re:IBM should put SCO out of misery

[Damouze]

The SCO that is currently trolling IBM is not the SCO that you remember as "such a good company". There are two SCO's:

* The Santa Cruz Operation (1979-2001). This is the SCO that you remember. They brought us Xenix (bought from M$), SCO Unix and Unixware. This SCO sold their rights to UNIX to Caldera Systems (then primarily known for Caldera/Open Linux and OpenDOS (bought from Novell, which had in turn bought it from Digital Research earlier). In those years they were mostly famous for filing an antitrust campaign against Microsoft). After selling their UNIX servers and services division to Caldera they renamed themselves as Tarantella Inc., after the product line they retained. Tarantella was subsequently bought by Sun Microsystems in 2005, which in turn was bought by Oracle in 2010.
* The SCO Group (2005-), formerly known as Caldera Systems / Caldera International. As Caldera they bought above SCO's UNIX servers and services division and subsequently renamed themselves to "The SCO Group". Like an evil David they tried to topple Goliath IBM by (falsely) claiming in court that programmers from IBM illegally copied code from SCO's OpenServer sources (supposedly their intellectual property was so secret that their allegations of verbatim copying code by IBM was "proven" by presentational slides which had the SCO code shown in Greek alphabet). Around the same time they started selling subscription based Linux licenses to large IT companies (which were led to believe that The SCO Group owned the rights to Linux). This ridiculous scheme went on for several years, until a judge decided, once and for all, that enough was enough and told them to bugger off, as in the meantime, it had become clear in a separate lawsuit that Novell was in fact the owner of the UNIX copyrights, not the SCO Group.