Lawsuits in Suits

In what many regard as a decade-long abuse of the legal system, SCO Group (remember Xenix and UnixWare?) has finally fired CEO Darl McBride. McBride was the man behind SCO lawsuits against multiple corporate Linux users for copyright infringement and demands for hefty licensing fees.

The SCO suit gained publicity in the FOSS community for targeting Linux as illegally containing licensed AT&T UNIX System V source code. During the protracted litigation, however, the strategy backfired when an internal SCO memo surfaced that revealed audits of Linux, by SCO itself, found no evidence of any UNIX license infringements. The courts also determined that SCO never actually owned the relevant UNIX copyrights in the first place. But even now, it's not clear that SCO has completely given up.