Three years ago Geoff Pullum and I both wrote about the claims by a company known as SCO that the Linux operating system contains large amounts of code taken from Unix, to which SCO claimed to own the copyrights. In addition to threats to Linux users, SCO filed a $3 billion dollar lawsuit against IBM. Further complicating matters, Novell announced that they rather than SCO owned the Unix copyrights, leading SCO to sue Novell for slander of title.
The outrage over SCO's claims was due largely to the wholly unsupported allegation that Linux had stolen large amounts of proprietary Unix code, for which SCO was unable to produce any convincing evidence. The courts have not yet ruled on that aspect of the case, though the judge in SCO v. IBM has commented on the paucity of evidence that SCO was able to produce. Today, however, Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell not SCO owns the copyrights. This of course guts SCO's case against IBM as well. The Free Software movement has been vindicated and SCO will soon be bankrupt.
Posted by Bill Poser at August 10, 2007 10:07 PM