The SCO versus IBM Unix ownership row has crawled out of its legal crypt again, this time wearing an Xinuos badge.
The long-running dispute over Unix and Linux ownership has resurfaced through SCO successor Xinuos. It is pursuing old licence and copyright claims tied to Project Monterey.
The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since expired.
The roots of the case lie in the 1998 alliance between IBM and the Santa Cruz Operation. SCO sold a version of Unix for x86 CPUs and fancied a bigger slice of the enterprise pie.
Those two outfits, along with Intel and Sequent, created “Project Monterey”. It was an effort to build a unified Unix that could run across several processors.
By 2001, Project Monterey was close to delivering a unified Unix. The achievement was made possible by mixing code from IBM and SCO.
By then, “Linux” already ran on multiple processors and Big Blue decided it was the future and walked away from Project Monterey.
IBM allegedly contributed some Monterey code to the open-source project and to its own AIX and Z operating systems. SCO reckoned it owned some of that code, so it sued IBM.
SCO and its successors struggled to stay alive. Interested parties kept the lawsuit breathing because owning chunks of Linux or IBM’s codebase could have turned into a glorious payday. This is particularly true if Xinuos can claim a share of Linux cash in the ultimate copyright troll in history.
The original case and its successors ended in 2021. The settlement saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault.
By then, SCO had sold its software to Xinuos, which decided the corpse still had a bit of twitch left in it. The Xinuos case has since burbled along quietly.
On 22 June, it reached the milestone of a hearing. The only modern touch was that the hearing was held online, with the presiding judge apparently going on mute at one point.
The arguments were a rehash of what they have always been. Project Monterey, past litigation, contested ownership, timing and the problem of proving who owned what are all being recycled.
Xinuos argued IBM never had a licence for SCO code. Big Blue argued it did nothing wrong.
