SCO, which began life as developers and marketers of the Caldera Linux distribution, but which had obtained rights to market Unix, claimed that IBM had stolen its copyrighted Unix code and committed it to Linux. However, the only “infringing” code made public was Unix code that was also licensed under the BSD license. The case never went to court, as the company from which SCO had purchased Unix marketing rights was able to prove in a separate case that the copyrights to Unix hadn’t switched hands when SCO had obtained the rights to market the operating system. The legal costs of fighting both IBM and the Unix copyright holder eventually forced SCO into bankruptcy.

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