SCO-Linux controversies

The SCO–Linux controversies are a series of legal and public disputes between the software company SCO Group (SCO) and various Linux vendors and users. The SCO Group alleges that its license agreements with IBM means that source code that IBM wrote and donated to be incorporated into Linux was added in violation of SCO's contractual rights. Members of the Linux community disagree with SCO's claims; IBM, Novell and Red Hat have ongoing claims against SCO.

On August 10, 2007, a federal district court judge in SCO v. Novell ruled on summary judgment that Novell, not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system. The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". After the ruling Novell announced they have no interest in suing people over Unix and stated "We don't believe there is Unix in Linux". The final district court ruling, on November 20, 2008, affirmed the summary judgment, and added interest and a constructive trust.

On August 24, 2009, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit partially reversed the district court judgment. The appeals court remanded back to trial on the issues of copyright ownership and Novell's contractual waiver rights. The court upheld the $2,547,817 award granted to Novell for the 2003 Sun agreement.

On March 30, 2010, following a jury trial, Novell, and not The SCO Group, was unanimously found to be the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights. The SCO Group, through bankruptcy trustee Edward Cahn, has decided to continue the lawsuit against IBM for causing a decline in SCO revenues.

On March 1, 2016, SCO's lawsuit against IBM was dismissed with prejudice; SCO then filed an appeal later that month.

Unix is a major computer operating system, developed in the United States of America. Prior to the events of this case, the intellectual property rights (IP) in Unix were held by Unix System Laboratories (USL), part of AT&T, but the area of IP ownership was complex. By 2003, the rights in Unix had been transferred several times and there was dispute as to the correct owner in law. Also some of the code within Unix had been written prior to the Copyright Act of 1976, or was developed by third parties, or was developed or licensed under different licenses existing at the time. The software company SCO Group (SCO), formerly Caldera International, asserted in 2003 that it was the owner of Unix, and that other unix-type operating systems - particularly the free operating system Linux and other variants of Unix sold by competitor companies - were violating their intellectual property by using Unix code without a license in their works.

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