It’s Back: District Court Judge Revives SCO v IBM

Lee Hutchinson | Ars Technica | June 17, 2013

Decade-old lawsuit exhumed in response to SCO motion for reconsideration.

Sad that Game of Thrones has wrapped up its third season? Looking for some drama to fill the time? We've got just the thing for you. One of the Internet's longest-running and most-hated lawsuits is back: SCO v. IBM has been reopened by Utah district court judge David Nuffer.

The case stretches back ten years to March 2003, when the SCO Group filed a massive $1 billion suit against IBM for allegedly contributing sections of commercial UNIX code from UNIX System V, which the SCO Group (allegedly) owned, to the Linux kernel's codebase. SCO Group claimed that the alleged presence of its proprietary code in the open source kernel devalued its proprietary code and that by making the source code available, IBM had violated its license agreement with SCO Group.

From there, the case spawned other cases and quickly ballooned to a truly ridiculous size and scope. [...]