If you’re a younger engineer, this probably won’t mean much to you but if you’ve been around since, say, the turn of the century it’s a huge story. Darl McBride has died and, oddly, no one seems to have noticed. McBride was at one time the bête noire of the open source movement. That was due to his Quixote-like suit against the Linux community claiming that they stole source code from Unix, which as the CEO of SCO, he claimed his company owned.
As it turned out, the courts ruled against his ownership claims and the suit died only to rise again and again phoenix-like every time it was putatively put to rest. If you weren’t there at the time it’s hard to understand its effect on the open source community. We all—all of us—obsessed about the case daily and religiously followed Groklaw, which often seemed to know more about what was happening than the lawyers involved.
The legacy of the SCO suit is that when its architect died, no one noticed. Linux, of course, has prospered and I’m pretty sure SCO, in whatever guise, has ceased to exist. Think of it as a moral lesson about the wages of turning to lawyers instead of actual engineering to save a dying company.