“In 2003, much of the talk at LinuxWorld Expo & Conference
was of the increasing worry about IP litigation involving Linux and
Unix, especially emanating from Lindon, Utah, via The SCO Group.
SCO had filed a $5 billion lawsuit the previous March against IBM,
contending that Big Blue had knowingly misused and distributed
SCO’s Unix System V code within its AIX operating system. A lot of
not-very-nice words were used last year to describe the litigation
that SCO was initiating. This year, things were different; the name
‘SCO’ was seldom heard.“Oh, there are still plenty of SCO-involved lawsuits (IBM,
AutoZone, Red Hat, Novell, etc.) shuffling their way through the
courts. No solid evidence has turned up during legal ‘discovery’
that incriminates IBM as being a patent-dodger or license
denigrator. In fact, IBM has poured a great amount of corporate
legal talent, time, effort, and money into proving SCO wrong; it
has said in so many words that it intends to beat the rap, no
matter how long it takes…”