page_title: SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.
section_title: The GPL issue
hierarchical_section_title: SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp. / The GPL issue
caption_attribution_description: Eben Moglen
context_page_description: SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp., commonly abbreviated as 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.
context_section_description: Within a few months of the filing of the lawsuit, Eben Moglen, the Free Software Foundation's legal counsel, stated that SCO's suit should not concern Linux users other than IBM. In an interview with internetnews.com, he was reported as saying:
  There is absolute difficulty with this line of argument which ought to make everybody in the world aware that the letters that SCO has put out can be safely put in the wastebasket...
  From the moment that SCO distributed that code under the GNU General Public License, they would have given everybody in the world the right to copy, modify and distribute that code freely...
  
  From the moment SCO distributed the Linux kernel under GPL, they licensed the use. Always. That's what our license says.
  Apparently noticing the incongruity of their selling a Linux distribution while suing IBM for stealing their intellectual property and giving it to the developers of that operating system, the SCO Group then announced on May 14, 2003, that they would no longer distribute Linux. According to a press release, SCO said that it would "continue to support existing SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux customers and hold them harmless from any SCO intellectual property issues regarding SCO Linux and Caldera OpenLinux products".
  SCO currently claims:
  Any code belonging to SCO that might have been GPL'd was done by SCO employees without proper legal authorization, and thus is not legally GPL'd.
  That for code to be GPL'd, the code's copyright owner must put a GPL notice before the code, but since SCO itself was not the one to add the notices, the code was never GPL'd.
caption: Eben Moglen
exif: {}