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SCO is actually two companies, and it's important to know the difference. There is "Old SCO" or "Santa Cruz Operation". They were Unix developers and ultimately working towards Linux adoption.

"Old SCO" was purchased by Caldera and became "New SCO" or "The SCO Group". They are mainly a litigation company who sues to make money. They have some dubious claims to ownership of Unix System V, which may be owned by Novel (depending on who's story you want to believe).

NEW SCO claims IMB illegally entered code belonging to them into Linux. IBM says this code was written by IBM and they can do whatever the hell they want with it. IBM also says much of this code was donated to Linux by SCO themselves when they published their own Linux diribution (both old and new).

Darl McBride (CEO of The SCO Group) is attempting to confuse the issues by bringing up unfounded accusations of GPL violations by IBM and supposed contract violations. New SCO also offered a "Protection" racket for a short time where you could by a license to run Linux and use "their" code legally. This didn't work very well (they sold only a small handful of licenses) and they then turned to suing former customers of SCO Unix.

The conventional wisdom is this all has been a proxy lawsuit(s) by Microsoft to attack Linux and introduce fear into the marketplace.

Thanks for the explanation. I'll have to talk to our two older sons about this. #1 son is in Law School, and will be working with a law firm during the summer that specializes in Intellectual Property and Patent Law. #2 son is in Grad School in Austin studying Computer Science. He's a Linux guy, so this might interest him as well. He's certainly interested in the Intellectual Property Rights idea because he hopes to generate some research that will come under that protection.