It’s hard for those of us who were there to believe but there is a good number of practicing software engineers who not only don’t remember but perhaps weren’t even born at the time of the SCO/IBM lawsuit over Linux. The TL;DR was that SCO decided to rescue their failing company by suing IBM for misappropriating Unix trade secrets and giving them to the Linux project.
If you weren’t there, it’s hard to understand the profound effect the suit and ensuing debacle had on us and our profession. It consumed a huge proportion of our mental cycles and generated significant anger. I remember checking Groklaw several times a day, especially once the suit came to trial. Engineers volunteered to attend the trial and report back to Groklaw, which invariably had trial news first. Even the lawyers used Groklaw as a resource. Like Linux itself, Groklaw was crowd sourced and open source.
LWN has a nice article celebrating the twentieth year anniversary of the suit. It does a great job describing what the suit was about, the community reaction to it, and why it ultimately failed. As the article points out, the suit paradoxically turned out strengthening Linux rather than weakening it.
If you were there, the article is a nice trip down memory lane. If you weren’t, the article will give you an idea about an event that cornered the attention of virtually everyone in our industry for a long time. Even years afterward, SCO would manage to revive some aspect or other of the suit. SCO and their suit now seem suitably dispatched but like the undead, we can never be sure.