SCO v. IBM

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 the judge in the case ruling against the last remaining claims, SCO's suit against IBM was dismissed with prejudice; SCO then filed an appeal later that month.

On March 6, 2003, the SCO Group (formerly known as Caldera International and Caldera Systems) filed a $1 billion lawsuit in the United States against IBM for allegedly “devaluing” its version of the UNIX operating system. SCO retained Boies Schiller & Flexner for this, and related subsequent litigation. The amount of alleged damages was later increased to $3 billion, and then $5 billion. SCO claimed that IBM had, without authorization, contributed SCO's intellectual property to the codebase of the open source, Unix-like Linux operating system. In May 2003, SCO Group sent letters to members of the Fortune 1000 and Global 500 companies warning them of the possibility of liability if they use Linux.

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