 | This article needs to be updated.(November 2017) |
| SCO–Linux disputes |
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| Overview |
| Litigation |
| Companies involved |
| Individuals involved |
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Red Hat v. SCO is a lawsuit filed by Red Hat against The SCO Group on August 4, 2003. Red Hat is asking for a permanent injunction against SCO's Linux campaign and a number of declaratory judgments that Red Hat has not violated SCO's copyrights.
Beginning in 2003, SCO Group has initiated a number of lawsuits and claims that Linux is infringing SCO's copyrights and that users and vendors of Linux should be held accountable for these infringements. Some statements even suggest that users of Linux could expect legal action from The SCO Group. Red Hat is a long time Linux vendor and market leader in offering Linux solutions.
As a response to these allegations, Red Hat filed suit against SCO on August 4, 2003. According to the filing, Red Hat has requested that the court make:
SCO replied with both a press release and two letters to Red Hat on the same day; their claims are reiterated in the press release ("Linux includes source code that is a verbatim copy of UNIX and carries with it no warranty or indemnification. SCO's claims are true and we look forward to proving them in court."), and the allegations made by Red Hat are denied ("SCO has not been trying to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt to end users."). The letters to Red Hat also hint at possible legal retaliations against Red Hat, saying:
Of course, we will prepare our legal response as required by your complaint. Be advised that our response will likely include counterclaims for copyright infringement and conspiracy. I must say that your decision to file legal action does not seem conducive to the long-term survivability of Linux.
On September 15, 2003, SCO filed a motion to dismiss, claiming there is no actual controversy between SCO and Red Hat and that Red Hat could not establish a reasonable apprehension that SCO will sue it for copyright infringement or misappropriation. In fact they claimed that the statements made by SCO representatives in the press that lead Red Hat to believe so were either misquoted or taken out of context. On the question of false advertising, SCO defended themselves by claiming that its statements were fully protected by the first amendment.
Red Hat wanted to proceed as quickly as possible and start discovery. Red Hat sent their first interrogatories, but on October 2, 2003, The SCO Group also filed a motion to stay discovery until the motion to dismiss is heard. Additionally they filed a motion asking for more time to answer Red Hat's first interrogatories.
For over 4 months, both parties waited for a response of the judge. Finally, Red Hat filed a motion to supplement the record with additional information. The additional information contained two letters sent by The SCO Group to Lehman Brothers, a Red Hat customer. In the first letter SCO once again claims ownership of Unix and that certain portions of Linux infringe on its Unix copyrights. In the second letter SCO threatened legal action if Lehman Brothers did not remedy the infringement. A letter sent by Lehman Brothers' counsel instructed SCO to take this matter up with Red Hat, their supplier of Linux products.
During the next 2 months, Red Hat and SCO fought about whether or not this additional, potentially damaging, information should be entered into the record. That fight came to an end when the judge finally made a decision.
In her opinion, dated April 6, 2004, Judge Robinson denied SCO's motion to dismiss. Additionally she stayed the lawsuit pending the resolution of the SCO v. IBM lawsuit, which makes the motion to supplement the record, the motion to stay discovery and the motion for more time to answer Red Hat's first interrogatories moot.
On April 21, 2004, Red Hat filed a motion to reconsider the stay, claiming SCO never asked for a stay and that a stay was inappropriate because the issues in the SCO v. IBM case would not solve the issues in the Red Hat v. SCO case. The SCO Group filed several memoranda in opposition of this motion.
On March 31, 2005, Red Hat's motion was denied, so the case now remains stayed until SCO v. IBM is resolved. The parties have to submit a letter to the court every 90 days.
On October 11, 2007 the case was closed with leave to reopen after the SCO group leaves Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
On April 18, 2008, Red Hat filed a claim with the court handling the SCO bankruptcy to have potential libel damages recognized by SCO as a liability if SCO loses future legal action. SCO objected and Red Hat filed again in pursuit of their claim.
(A complete list of court documents is available at Tuxrocks.)
United Linux was an attempt by a consortium of Linux distributors to create a common base distribution for enterprise use, so as to minimize duplication of engineering effort and form an effective competitor to Red Hat. The founding members of United Linux were SUSE, Turbolinux, Conectiva and Caldera International. The consortium was announced on May 30, 2002. The end of the project was announced on January 22, 2004.
Darl Charles McBride is an entrepreneur and CEO of Shout TV Inc. McBride is known as the former CEO of The SCO Group. On March 7, 2003, during McBride's tenure as CEO of the company, The SCO Group initiated litigation against IBM, alleging breach of contract and copyright infringement claims connected to Unix. The case is considered one of the top 10 technology battles of all time. SCO Group lost in a series of court battles, and was eventually forced into bankruptcy.
SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp., commonly abbreviated as SCO v. IBM, is a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court of Utah. The SCO Group asserted that there are legal uncertainties regarding the use of the Linux operating system due to alleged violations of IBM's Unix licenses in the development of Linux code at IBM. The lawsuit was filed in 2003, it has lingered on through the bankruptcy of SCO Group and the adverse result in SCO v. Novell, and was reopened for continued litigation by order of a new judge on June 14, 2013. Pursuant to the court order reopening the case, an IBM Motion for Summary Judgment was filed based upon the results of the Novell decision. On December 15, 2014, the judge granted most of IBM's motion, thereby narrowing the scope of the case, which remained open. On March 1, 2016, following a ruling against the last remaining claims, the judge dismissed SCO's suit against IBM with prejudice. SCO filed an appeal later that month. In February 2018, as a result of the appeal and the case being partially remanded to the circuit court, the parties restated their remaining claims and provided a plan to move toward final judgement.
SCO, The SCO Group, and The TSG Group are the various names of an American software company in existence from 2002 to 2012 that became known for owning Unix operating system assets that had belonged to the Santa Cruz Operation, including the UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, and then, under CEO Darl McBride, pursuing a series of high-profile legal battles known as the SCO-Linux controversies.
Groklaw was a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003 by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML.
USL v. BSDi was a lawsuit brought in the United States in 1992 by Unix System Laboratories against Berkeley Software Design, Inc and the Regents of the University of California over intellectual property related to the Unix operating system; a culmination of the Unix wars. The case was settled out of court in 1994 after the judge expressed doubt in the validity of USL's intellectual property, with Novell and the University agreeing not to litigate further over the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
The SCO–Linux disputes were a series of legal and public disputes between the software company SCO Group (SCO) and various Linux vendors and users. The SCO Group alleged that its license agreements with IBM meant that source code IBM wrote and donated to be incorporated into Linux was added in violation of SCO's contractual rights. Members of the Linux community disagreed with SCO's claims; IBM, Novell and Red Hat filed claims against SCO.
SCO v. Novell was a United States lawsuit in which The SCO Group (SCO), a Linux and Unix vendor, claimed ownership of the source code for the Unix operating system. SCO sought to have the court declare that SCO owned the rights to the Unix code, including the copyrights, and that Novell had committed slander of title by asserting a rival claim to ownership of the Unix copyrights. Separately, SCO was attempting to collect license fees from Linux end-users for Unix code through their SCOsource division, and Novell's rival ownership claim was a direct challenge to this initiative.
SCO Group v. DaimlerChrysler was a lawsuit filed in the United States, in the state of Michigan. In December 2003, SCO sent a number of letters to Unix licensees. In these letters, SCO demanded that the licensees certify certain things regarding their usage of Linux. DaimlerChrysler, a former Unix user and current Linux user, did not respond to this letter. On March 3, 2004, SCO filed suit against DaimlerChrysler for violating their Unix license agreement, by failing to respond to the certification request made by SCO. The parties agreed to a stipulated dismissal order on December 21, 2004. The case was dismissed without prejudice, but if SCO wishes to pursue the timeliness claim again, it must pay DaimlerChrysler's legal fees since August 9. On December 29, 2004, SCO filed a claim of appeal notice. On January 31, 2005, the claim of appeal was dismissed.
Beginning in 2003, The SCO Group was involved in a dispute with various Linux vendors and users. SCO initiated a series of lawsuits, the most known of which were SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell, that had implications upon the futures of both Linux and Unix. SCO claimed that Linux violated some of SCO's intellectual properties. Many industry observers were skeptical of SCO's claims, and they were strongly contested by SCO's opponents in the lawsuits, some of which launched counter-claims. By 2011, the lawsuits fully related to Linux had been lost by SCO or rendered moot and SCO had gone into bankruptcy. However the SCO v. IBM suit continued for another decade, as it included contractual disputes related to both companies' involvement in Project Monterey in addition Linux-related claims. Finally in 2021 a settlement was reached in which IBM paid the bankruptcy trustee representing what remained of SCO the sum of $14.25 million.
SCOsource is a business division of The SCO Group that manages its Unix intellectual property. The term SCOsource is often used for SCO's licensing program that allows corporate users of Linux to buy licenses to proprietary Unix technology that SCO claims exists in the Linux operating system. A single CPU license costs $699 (USD).
During its SCO Forum conference of 2003, The SCO Group (SCO) showed several examples of allegedly illegal copying of copyrighted code into Linux. The open source community quickly debunked most of the examples shown. In particular, one example showed that code from Unix was indeed used in some of SGI's Linux contributions. The Linux maintainers stated that the code in question had in fact already been removed from Linux before the example had been revealed — not because it was infringing, but because the code in question had needlessly duplicated some functions which were already present in Linux. SGI and other analysts also responded to this matter and confirmed that the code in question had never infringed at all.
A declaratory judgment, also called a declaration, is the legal determination of a court that resolves legal uncertainty for the litigants. It is a form of legally binding preventive by which a party involved in an actual or possible legal matter can ask a court to conclusively rule on and affirm the rights, duties, or obligations of one or more parties in a civil dispute. The declaratory judgment is generally considered a statutory remedy and not an equitable remedy in the United States, and is thus not subject to equitable requirements, though there are analogies that can be found in the remedies granted by courts of equity. A declaratory judgment does not by itself order any action by a party, or imply damages or an injunction, although it may be accompanied by one or more other remedies.
The history of Unix dates back to the mid-1960s. when the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AT&T Bell Labs, and General Electric were jointly developing an experimental time-sharing operating system called Multics for the GE-645 mainframe. Multics introduced many innovations, but also had many problems. Bell Labs, frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not its aims, slowly pulled out of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics – among them Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna – decided to redo the work, but on a much smaller scale.
Caldera OpenLinux (COL) is a defunct Linux distribution. Caldera originally introduced it in 1997 based on the German LST Power Linux distribution, and then taken over and further developed by Caldera Systems since 1998. A successor to the Caldera Network Desktop put together by Caldera since 1995, OpenLinux was an early "business-oriented distribution" and foreshadowed the direction of developments that came to most other distributions and the Linux community generally.
Linux began in 1991 as a personal project by Finnish student Linus Torvalds: to create a new free operating system kernel. The resulting Linux kernel has been marked by constant growth throughout its history. Since the initial release of its source code in 1991, it has grown from a small number of C files under a license prohibiting commercial distribution to the 4.15 version in 2018 with more than 23.3 million lines of source code, not counting comments, under the GNU General Public License v2.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt is a propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear.
A copyright troll is a party that enforces copyrights it owns for purposes of making money through strategic litigation, in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, sometimes while without producing or licensing the works it owns for paid distribution. Critics object to the activity because they believe it does not encourage the production of creative works, but instead makes money through the inequities and unintended consequences of high statutory damages provisions in copyright laws intended to encourage creation of such works.
Xinuos is an American software company that was created in 2011 and was first called UnXis until assuming its current name in 2013. Xinuos develops and markets the Unix-based OpenServer 6, OpenServer 5, and UnixWare 7 operating systems, which have a long history in the marketplace, with prior owners being the Santa Cruz Operation and The SCO Group, as well as the newer OpenServer 10 operating system, which it developed upon a base of FreeBSD.
Free and open source software is distributed under a variety of free-software licenses which differ significantly from other kinds of software license. Legal action against these licences involves questions about their validity and enforceability.
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