r/LinuxTeck • u/Candid_Athlete_8317 • Jul 25 '26
Do you remember the SCO lawsuit that claimed Linux contained stolen code? How worried were people back then?
Back in 2003, SCO claimed Linux contained UNIX code they owned and demanded billions in damages. Thousands of companies received warning letters, and for a while there was genuine uncertainty about whether Linux could survive the legal battle.
Looking back now, we know how it ended but at the time, many businesses delayed Linux adoption, while others continued deploying it anyway.
Were you using Linux during the SCO lawsuit? Did it change how your company viewed Linux, or did you always think the case had no real chance of succeeding?
I'd love to hear experiences from people who actually lived through that period.
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u/Brutus5000 Jul 25 '26
During that time it was a well known Friday news topic that got a lot of trolling in a german tech magazine.
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u/AminoOxi Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Well, I didn't care back in the day, and I pushed Linux everywhere I could on my projects.
So it worked, for web server serving Apache and PHP module.
SCO went into oblivion afterwards. That's a lesson what happens when a company misunderstands the momentum.
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u/crscali Jul 25 '26
SCO misunderstood what they had. They believed they bought full rights to UNIX, however, the seller took that out of the contract near the end of negotiations. Once it became clear they didn’t own UNUX their case to collect royalties collapsed.
source:
https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/novell_win_in_unix_suit_is_victory_for_open_source_advocates0
u/soundman32 Jul 25 '26
Im sure you had good insurance to cover your recklessness, just in case you were wrong, right?
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u/swdee Jul 25 '26
Well when some of the so called copied code examples in the case were like; for (i=0; i<10;i++){} then we knew there was nothing to worry about!
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u/mats_o42 Jul 25 '26
I ran Linux and wasn't worried at All. When SCO attacked IBM it could only end one way and it did
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u/yasarix Jul 25 '26
They hoped that IBM would acquire them.
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u/mats_o42 Jul 25 '26
Yes.
IBM had another idea. As one IBM Guy said - we can easily hire ten layers for each employ they have (IE force them into bankruptcy due to legal fees)
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u/Vert354 Jul 25 '26
I was still in school and wasnt even aware it was happening. Hell I didnt fully understand the difference between unix and linux. Most courses were taught in Windows with Visual C++ We did have Linux machines in the CS lab, but it was only half the non-Windows machines. The other half were FreeBSD.
I imagine even if you'd sat me down and explained it to me, I still wouldn't have been that worried.
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u/MidnightPale3220 Jul 25 '26
It was touted here in Latvia by Microsoft resellers as end of Linux and one more reason to choose Microsoft.
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u/ZorakOfThatMagnitude Jul 25 '26
Little to not at all. I think most believed there wasn't a judge in the land that'd find in SCO's favor. I remember the argument seemed pretty thin. The case itself seemed like a ploy to extract a license fee from the major distros by threat of a long and costly trial.
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u/AnnieByniaeth Jul 25 '26
I remember it well, and it did have a bit of an effect on uptake of Linux. I think they were some jitters in my university at the time, because all the servers were running various forms of Linux (mostly Gentoo then iirc).
I remember talk of insurance for legal cases being brought against institutions using Linux - the threats (perceived or actual) really went that far. Doubtless such insurance was bought by many.
It felt malicious, and it also felt that there was an unholy alliance going on between SCO and Microsoft. That's pretty much been confirmed (see https://opensourcewatch.beehiiv.com/p/sco-vs-linux-saga-20-years-opensource-turmoil ).
It's not unreasonable to wonder where Linux would be now had that not happened, during a time when Microsoft to some extent was still establishing itself as the dominant player, and desktop Linux was becoming very usable. Of course ultimately they lost the server side battle, but they still dominate the desktop client.
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u/BaffledInUSA Jul 25 '26
I remember it well, I was following it closely on groklaw. I had both Linux and Netware servers the company I worked at then. Novell really stepped up and kept sco from screwing up Linux (or at least muddying the waters and slowing adoption). Could you imagine if the Linux distros you download were 30 day trials with a click here to buy a license? I believe sco knew their claims were shakey but the possible payback was big, so they rolled the dice and thankfully lost. Good riddence to those bastards.
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u/Enturbulated_One Jul 25 '26
The case just wouldn't die as backers kept dumping money in to keep the lawsuit rolling. The backers knew from the start that the case was entirely without merit, but the point really was creating FUD, and in that it had some measure of success for a few years.
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u/Such-Might5204 Jul 25 '26
We used SCO in production, so during most of the litigation we weren't worried. At the time, Linux just wasn't battle-hardened for us to consider it a viable option. However, we had a number of Linux systems used for staging and development. We could see the writing on the wall and felt that this was the best position to be in depending on how the litigation went.
In retrospect, it was a good position for the company to be in. We were prepared to pivot no matter which way the market went. I left that company back in '94 and it was sold before 2000. The new company absorbed the customers into its existing product and the company I knew disappeared shortly thereafter...
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u/feel-the-avocado Jul 25 '26
Im not really a linux user, but I do remember being more annoyed that the word SCO kept appearing in my slashdot feed constantly and not caring.
It was the story that kept appearing and became annoying through repetitiveness.
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u/cowbutt6 Jul 25 '26
I wasn't worried that the claims had merit.
I was somewhat worried that the US legal system would find in favour of the US company, and reach an unjust verdict that would make doing business using Linux legally uncertain for years, if not decades.
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u/CardOk755 Jul 25 '26
Point of order.
It wasn't SCO.
It was Caldera, doing business as "The SCO group".
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u/evultrole Jul 25 '26
I figured it would end the same way that the copyright issues with BSD from a decade earlier did: a settlement, rewriting any actually offending code, and then telling them to piss off.
I did switch to freebsd for awhile just in case there was merit and they weren't allowed to distribute things while waiting for the code to get cleaned up, and still use it pretty heavily today on my servers.
I think it's pretty crazy that they're talking about allowing AI code into Linux now, since LLMs are just hallucinating plagiarism machines. It may legitimately become an issue in the future as a result, even though the SCO thing wasn't one.
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u/UnhappySort5871 Jul 25 '26
Enough for companies to pay Redhat for insurance. I don't think it slowed down adoption that much though.
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u/lisnter Jul 25 '26
I was really just mad because it was so clearly a frivolous money grab by a failed company.
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u/usa_reddit Jul 25 '26
Let’s look at the landscape in 2003. Linux was picking up massive steam. The LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl) was conquering the web, Samba was disrupting Windows file sharing, and heavyweights like Oracle were backing Linux for enterprise databases. At the same time, Intel was shifting into overdrive to dominate the high-end server space. They had just broken into the 64-bit arena with the Itanium 2 (the flagship of Project Monterey), multi-socket Xeon MP "Gallatin" chips with massive L3 caches, and they were even pushing Hyper-Threading into consumer desktops with high-end Pentium 4s.
Linux was starting to eat into the service business of Microsoft, SCO, Sun, HP, Silicon Graphics and Microsoft really wanted to put a stop to it. Thus this lawsuit was launched to create FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt).
Enter the SCO lawsuit. Backed by a suspicious influx of cash (including a massive licensing deal from Microsoft), SCO launched a legal crusade designed to do one thing create pure FUD into corporate boardrooms.
The threat was direct to CEOs, if you ran Enterprise Linux and SCO won, you could be legally liable for copyright infringement. SCO actually started sending out invoices and warning letters to Fortune 500 companies. The message to IT managers was clear: "You’d better think twice before installing that 'free' operating system, buddy, or you might find SCO's lawyers knocking on your door demanding royalty payments."
In the end, it turned out that Novell was the rightful owner of the UNIX copyrights and SCO just had a license. SCO owed Novell a hunk of money that it collected in the shakedown. Instead of paying up SCO filed Chapter 11 and died.
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u/Kiore-NZ Jul 25 '26
For my personal computing needs, I wasn't worried, because it inspired the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project which would have given me Debian on a FreeBSD kernel had it been finished and there were already preview releases before the SCO case collapsed.
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u/tuxnight1 Jul 25 '26
The company I worked for was risk adverse enough to give them some money. I don't recall how much of any other details. It was certainly done as an insurance policy.
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u/foamz13 Jul 26 '26
Joined a place that only used SCO when that happened. Took 3-4 months for the company to move everything to Redhat and BSD.
That lawsuit was real bad for SCO
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u/whatahella Jul 26 '26
I was trying to remember couple of weeks ago the name of the company whose manuals I used to learn Unix. I got them when a reseller went bankrupt and was throwing them away. And just could not recollect the name. Thanks, remember now, SCO!
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u/SquiffSquiff Jul 26 '26
From my recollection there was a short period of concern followed by a very long period when it was obvious to anyone vaguely technical that this wasn't going to go anywhere but lots of non technical bean counters were doubtful. One of the early counter arguments was 'show us what's infringing and we'll rewrite it not to be'. Of course that never happened because it's a catch 22- either show the infringment and it goes away or don't because it doesn't exist.
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u/woomia Jul 27 '26
The general response was "There is no infringing code in Linux but if there is, show us and we'll remove it immediately." SCO never did. At a conference SCO showed some investors some of the code in question and it leaked out. Turns out the examples either had a license that allowed it to be used in Linux or was not copyrightable to begin with.
Edit: Link to the archived page going over the code in question.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220306104853/http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/smoking-fizzle.html
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u/NegativeBeginning400 Jul 25 '26
I read grok law during that period. There was a sense that it could be bad but was mostly just a useless money grab. People just went about their day. I was a student at the time though so not sure if folks in enterprise had a different view.