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Posted on 07/06/2026 10:37:47 AM PDT by ShadowAce
The ancient dispute over ownership of UNIX, and perhaps Linux too, has returned to court. Again.
As The Register has explained many, many, times since this matter first went to court in 2003, the roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created “Project Monterey” – an effort to create a unified version of UNIX that could run on multiple processors.
By 2001, Project Monterey was close to delivering a unified UNIX, an achievement made possible by blending code from IBM and SCO.
By then, a little project called “Linux” already ran on multiple processors. Big Blue decided Linux was the future and bailed from Project Monterey – then allegedly contributed some Monterey code to the open-source project and to its own AIX and Z operating systems. SCO felt it owned some of that code, so sued IBM.
SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBM’s code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday.
The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault.
But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on.
The Xinuos case has burbled along quietly since, and on June 22nd reached the milestone of a hearing.
The matter has become a little more modern, if only because this hearing was held online and the presiding judge appeared to unwittingly be on mute at one point. But the arguments otherwise seemed to revisit Project Monterey, debated the relevance of past litigation, contested who owned what, when they owned it, and how they could prove it. Xinuos argued IBM never had a license for SCO code. Big Blue argued that it did nothing wrong.
The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since expired.
The matter continues and appears likely to do so until either the heat death of the universe or the year of Linux on the desktop – whichever comes sooner. ®
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We ran a version of Berkley Unix on our VAX 11-780’s back in the day.
Litigating with IBM is never a good idea. The Justice department learned that years ago (after litigating from 1969 - 1982.) It appears that patent trolls haven’t figured it out yet. (Although SCO eventually found out the hard way).
Caveat - IBM quickly folder this year when the government sued over IBM engaging in DEI practices. For some reason, IBM was happy to rid itself of some DEI mandates.
Wait...
This again???
Guess we need to go back and review all those threads from the late 90s and early 2000s.
What were the keywords?
#linux, #SCO, #AutoZone, #IBM, #Groklaw, etc...
(Wish I had bought that popcorn stock way back when)
Isn’t MacOS based on UNIX ? LOL Want money that’s the place to get it ,LOL
“Lieutenant Dan got me invested in some kind of fruit company”.
There is nothing new under the sun
If you’re gonna talk about Macs, don’t forget to talk about the Xerox Alto, where they got a lot of their ideas from.
It’s kind of funny, that on my way back from town earlier today I suddenly found myself wondering about whatever happened to OS/2 Warp.
I have a sealed distribution on floppies. Original box. Marked the start of career.
That OS had like 40 (a bunch for sure) 3.5” disks for the install. What a pain it was.
Jarndyce v Jarndyce
AI coding should make these lawsuits even more interesting. If you ask an AI system to “give me some code to do this”, it gets the original code from somewhere. Every time that’s done is a potential copyright and patent violation.
Paging Pamela Jones and Groklaw.
She had me glued to the screen for many months (years?) following the developments.
God, I hate Steve Ballmer and his crew of legal miscreants and stalking horses.
I remember putting Copyright 1984 Company Name on some Internet software I wrote.
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